


I’ll take hold of you

by Lessandra



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (adorable) stupid people, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Fusion, BAMF Stiles, EWP - Emotions Without Plot, I accidentally sterek, I don't know why I wrote this, I don't think this has a plot, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Relationship Is Hard, author has a lot of sterek feels, canon has been bent in ways canons are not meant to bend, kings of miscommunication, much AU very yes, real wolf werewolves, so self-indulgent there's no excuse, touch!kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 20:50:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2124261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lessandra/pseuds/Lessandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Stiles could boil his life down to one moment, it would be this: his hand in Derek’s hand, radiating warmth as they sit together—on the edge of the forest, in Stiles’s living room, on the terrace of Derek’s house, wherever—and wait for the morning to come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I’ll take hold of you

**Author's Note:**

> Implementing the general idea from Gail Carriger’s “Soulless” series, but that’s not even how it worked in the books exactly, so.  
> Mostly Seasons 1 & 2 canon, because I’m lazy like that, I guess, and because I miss that old type of canon.  
> Once again, I genuinely try to write a 10k one-shot, and end up with this.

**_~ For Dodger._ **  
**_You are the Stiles to my Scott._ **  
**_I would be lost without you. ~_ **

* * *

 

 

 

 _Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you_  
_with my heart as with a hand._  
_—Rainer Maria Rilke_

 

When Scott and Stiles are thirteen, for about five or so months they think about starting a band. They take turns _~~entertaining~~_ aggravating Scott’s mom and Stiles’s dad by trying to get a hang of guitar playing. Mostly, they just spend time thinking up future album titles, drawing cover arts and band insignias, and trying to come up with a cool and catchy name to call themselves. Something indie but suave, like _Howling at the Beacon,_ or some other vague nod to their hometown.

It’s Scott’s mom who playfully starts calling them the _‘Soulful Duo’_ —joking that they could go double Timberlake on girls, what with her son’s lovable puppy eyes and Stiles’s charming smile and adorable antics. Their response is mortified groans, because _‘Mom, really, don’t. You’re so far off here,’_ but she’s Scott’s _mom_ , so she is allowed to see only the best in her kid and his best friend. And _because_ she’s a mom, they don’t particularly expect her to know what young people actually listen to.

They make a joke out of it, and it sticks. And even years later Melissa would call one of them ‘soulful’ with a teasing light in her eyes.

In retrospect, the whole thing is just too damned ironic.

 

***

 

 _His eyes not yet accustomed, Stiles can’t see well in the dark of the cell he is shoved into. The door slams hard behind him and hits him in the back, breaking his balance. Stiles reaches blindly for a wall, trying to steady himself. It scratches his fingers with cold and slime. Stiles squints, trying to make out anything in the formless darkness. He_ guesses _rather than sees a presence of something else._

_A shape moves in the far corner, uncoiling and massive and dangerous. He sees a glint of teeth and hears the rumbling beginnings of a snarl._

_The glowing eyes peering out at him are blood red._

 

***

 

Here is a small truth:  
**Stiles has no soul.**

To dispel the popular rumors around the fact, here’s a list of other truths:

  1. Lacking soul does **_not_** mean you grow up to be Lord Voldemort.
  2. Nor do you grow up to become Dorian Gray.
  3. You are not in fact in any way different from other human beings in terms of your kindness, emotional stability and a sense of morality.
  4. You are also not a lobotomized zombie, or a mindless drone, or anything else that you crazy people pick up from sci-fi and other nonsense. Books and movies almost always get it wrong. _(So don’t come knocking at his friend Scott’s door asking about werewolves either, if you’re armed with nothing but the knowledge you’ve picked up from reading Harry Potter. It will end in tears.)_
  5. You will also not go to Hell, because being soulless has nothing to do with religion.



On his good days Stiles thinks the term _‘soulless’_ was coined by a moron who didn’t understand the first thing about what makes the supernatural into what they are, and it’s all probably genetic anyway. On his sulky days Stiles watches Scott with a touch of envy and develops a brief inferiority complex. Most days, he doesn’t care squat about what other people might choose to call him, because it’s not about your fucking thesaurus, but about what he can and cannot do.

And what being “soulless” means is this: him sitting on the floor of Scott’s room, his friend shackled to the pipes with a mother of all chains, and clutching Scott’s hand (or, rather, having his hand squashed in Scott’s), heart pounding at his ribs from the inside like it wants to get out, to escape— ** _he_** _wants to pound at the door of Scott’s room and get out and escape forget this room forget this night he doesn’t really want to he’s never been one to run away even when terrified which he lately is too often for his own liking shut up Stiles_.

Scott’s brow is glistening, more from fear than pain, or so Stiles hopes. He squeezes Stiles’s palm, and Stiles hurriedly squeezes back as a show of reassurance. He cannot, under any circumstances, let go…

 

***

 

Werewolves are insane.

Initially he means it in broader terms, because believing in mythological creatures guarantees you a free trip to the loony bin. (Later, he will mean it because Peter and Derek are both different shades of crazy, and even Scott is starting to lose it under all the pressure.)

Stiles might have been an imaginative kid growing up. He might have been a little Conan-Doyle-dependent and dragged Scott to snoop on his father’s cases. By the time he’s sixteen, no one is surprised anymore to spot him hanging around the crime scenes.

Stiles may believe in many things that other would call naïve. He believes that they will find a cure for Alzheimer’s and cancer. That he’ll shake his ADHD along with teenage lankiness and hormonal outbursts. That he has a chance with Lydia Martin. That he’ll find true love. That he and Scott will be inseparable until they’re senile. That _hoping_ pays off, and that the Universe doesn’t hate him and maybe kind of looks out for him. That there is justice in the world. That there are no coincidences.

What he **_doesn’t_** believing in are the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and Pinky the freaking Unicorn. Because Stiles might have been an imaginative kid, but he’s not _six_ any longer. Scott, however, has problems growing up. So when he gets lost in the woods at night, he comes back to Stiles swearing a wolf mauled him, even though there’s not a mark on his body.

Mocking him for it doesn’t get old for a few days straight. He’s wearing a patiently amused face as he listens to Scott blather on about Allison for ten minutes on end and, it appears, without taking a single breath, having this whole ‘I-want-to-write-ballads’ love-at-first-sight thing going on.

“You must think I’m insane,” he mutters sheepishly, noticing Stiles’s expression.

“Oh, that’s not insane,” Stiles consoles him with a patronizing pat on a shoulder. “You know what’s insane, though? Werewolves.”

 

***

 

Scott transforms into a wolf on Friday.

 

***

 

When Stiles is very very small, (long before he pretends to be a regular smart-ass), his mother reads him to sleep, kisses him good-night, and in the dim light of the night-lamp Stiles lies wide awake and imagines all kinds of wondrous adventures he and Scott are having in distant and fantastic lands. They are dragon-fighters and glorious knights, noble outlaws and vigilantes, Jedis and spies, and never, _never_ does he have to be just an ADHD-ridden boy.

When Stiles is relatively small, (a short while before he starts becoming a regular smart-ass), he knows that life has quantifiable limits and a set of expectations, and he wants to be someone _different_. He wants to be even-tempered and collected, mildly athletic and highly academic, someone who will have no trouble getting into colleges, or simply choosing a career. Someone who will not bring trouble to his dad; someone to make him proud.

He wants _furiously_ for his mom to be alive.

At night, he lies awake with eyes closed and wishes, really hard, to be someone _special_. To be bitten by a radioactive spider, or get a letter from bloody Hogwarts, or meet an insane mentor who will introduce him to a world beyond your everyday vision. Because reality—with its necessity for earning a degree and getting a job and earning money to get by—is constricting and grounding and choking. Life as it is scares him. But the world is mercilessly boringly real.

 

***

 

So, apparently, werewolves? Not that insane. Stiles is mulling over the thought as he is buying chains in a hardware store. Scott is waiting for him in the car, alternating between quietly freaking out and majorly freaking out. Stiles picks up a pen absent-mindedly and is tapping it against the counter, obviously developing some form of a nervous tick.

Seeing Scott claws-out and eyes glowing yellow is a heady rush that drowns his body in adrenaline. But Stiles really would have been perfectly satisfied without the empirical evidence of what it does to his best friend.

His eyes fall down onto his arm where there’s a deep gash where Scott’s claws got him, and Stiles tugs his sleeve down nervously, preferring not to think how close of a call it was. His mind paints a colorful picture of his dad being called to a crime scene where Stiles is the victim, and that sends him into a panicky mode that he cannot afford to be having, because he has to be calm and collected for the both of them.

 _Tap-tap-tap,_ the pen goes louder.

Stiles wasn’t really banking on anything when he grabbed Scott by the wrists, hoping just to keep him at arm’s length as he evades his teeth. But pretty much as soon as his fingers wrap around Scott, it’s all over. He can feel the fight and the resistance draining out of Scott’s body.

“Stiles?” he mutters hoarsely, squinting at the light, and his face crunches up in mortification as he stumbles backwards, putting a wide breadth between them. “Crap. What did I do?” His eyes fall on Stiles’s arm and he looks like he might be sick, which is really uncool, because he doesn’t get to freak out when it’s Stiles who’s hurt and has every right to bitch about this. He lets Scott freak out anyway.

“Nothing major, just tried to make me a shish-kebab for your wolfy pleasures.” He studies him with careful apprehension, looking for signs the wolfing out may come back. “Why did you stop?”

“I dunno!” Scott is panicking and seems unable to think straight. “I was just!—One moment I’m just seeing red, it’s all a haze, and the next thing I know is I see your face and—it doesn’t make any sense, just—I—it was like I was completely gone—um, I mean, and then it was just me. Gosh shit crap I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

He stands there, helpless, and Stiles doesn’t point out how, where Scott’s claws that slashed him have retracted, Scott now has Stiles’s blood on his fingertips. Things are so completely fucked up without him noticing details like these.

“Lucky break,” Stiles mutters instead and doesn’t believe it himself. Scott nods, because he needs to believe it.

Time will prove Stiles right, of course, because fat chance of them catching a break, lucky or otherwise. That would be too easy.

 

***

 

“ _Soulless_ ” is more of a slang term, really. And plain rude, too, although the Argents’ Bestiary calls what he is a “ _soul sucker_ ”, which Stiles takes great offense at, because that’s really just uncalled-for. Deaton (and Scott picks up the habit after him) calls him a _preternatural_. Which basically means he’s neither here nor there.

Scott is dealing with the fact that even his boss is not entirely human. Stiles is however too busy figuring out what **_he_** is to be trying to understand what someone else might be.

“Scott will need you on the next full moon,” Deaton tells him kindly, but with intent. “It’s better this way.” He looks at the young man he employs. “You are very lucky, Scott. The moon brings with it a type of madness that makes the werewolves forget all things human. Most, especially ones so very young, need to lock themselves up on the full moon, or they could hurt somebody. You, as it happens, just need to hold your friend’s hand.”

They don’t get it, because Deaton is above being consecutive in his explanations, _and_ because he enjoys being a smug mysterious bastard, as far as Stiles can tell. Thankfully, Deaton doesn’t just sit on what he knows—this time, anyway.

The concept of Stiles and the likes of him lacking in the soul department stems from an outdated idea that a person is more likely to survive the bite and the first transformation if they have more _‘soul’_. Which is why back in the Renaissance era it was seen as completely _comme il faut_ for werewolves to go around biting artists, musicians, and the like.

And then there were those like Stiles—who numbered a hundred all over the world back then, and are hardly more than a dozen at present, by Deaton’s estimate. Those with no soul at all. Whose negation of supernatural is so strong that a single touch—skin on skin—can turn a wolf back into its natural human state.

The extents of such powers have never been measured: like most endangered species, preternaturals were a shy bunch. What Deaton tells them is the touch reverts a werewolf back to human form no matter the state of their transformation: whether it be the bad case of glowing eyes and claws and fangs-out that Scott gets on any regular day of the week when he loses control, or the all-the-way four-legged metamorphosis.

“It _should_ take no more than a second.”

Stiles is still really hung up on the ‘should’.

And as soon as the skin contact breaks, so does the hold the preternatural’s power has over the werewolf, leaving him to revert to being a monster.

(Derek will be the first one to call what he is a _‘curse-breaker’_.)

 

***

 

Derek Hale appears to have emerged right from the pages of an _Idiot’s Guide to Stalking_ , bringing with him all the clichés: clad all in black, ominous lurking in the background, followed by disappearing into thin air. Stiles isn’t sure he has ever seen him blink. Derek’s eyes stare down at you with such vehemence like he has a list of reasons to dislike you already, and every time he’s under its scrutiny Stiles has an uneasy feeling Derek might actually burn holes into him. (It’s only later that Stiles will find out that by Derek Hale’s standards that’s just mild annoyance—or that mild annoyance is the default Derek Hale setting—and adjust his perception accordingly.)

“You should talk some sense into your friend.”

Stiles has been exiting his house, rummaging through his bag, and doesn’t see Derek leaning against the hood of Stiles’s Jeep. Startled, he almost drops everything, because _Creeping up much!_

“Would it **_kill_** you to produce sound? Geez, give a guy a warning!”

Derek doesn’t move a muscle and seems to be patiently awaiting a response.

“What sense am I talking into him?” Stiles grouses.

“He needs training.”

And he needs to keep his head level, _Just keep calm, Stiles, no sudden movements, don’t antagonize the nice werewolf felon,_ and he doesn’t want to look Derek in the eyes but cannot look away, and he thinks his heart is transmitting in Morse code the only thing pulsing in his head right now: _This is Derek Hale, he killed a girl in cold blood, killed a girl in cold blood, a girl all in blood, cut in two in the woods, Derek Hale killed her, all that blood._

Derek raises an eyebrow demandingly, waiting for an answer, and Stiles makes a meek choking sound in his throat. He thinks that if he opens his mouth, all he would blurt out will be, _‘Not from a cold-blooded murderer he doesn’t!’_ What he says instead is, “We get by fine without you, thanks.” Because Stiles is kind of magic, and it was intense for a while, but now it’s all okay, problem solved. No criminal help needed.

Derek’s face darkens. Stiles half expects him to pull some sort of horror-movie demonic shit and cross the distance between them in the blink of an eye, like a creepy mysterious asshole, and just suddenly _be there_ , in his face.

He startles a little when Derek moves, but the guy walks like any other, and the weird fancy Stiles has been entertaining dissipates bringing in its stead a deflated sense of embarrassment.

“You think your surfing the Net is gonna help your stupid friend?” Derek challenges him with a scowl, and Stiles thinks that someone is simply a sour loser. Scott said no to his mentorship, and the guy simply can’t deal.

Derek’s leaning over Stiles as he speaks, forcing him to bend backwards and away and it feels (looks) a lot like cowering. Stiles isn’t too fond of being cowered.

“Well, you weren’t doing him any good,” he points out, pushing his index finger into Derek’s chest, trying to win back some ground.

Derek stares at him mutely, like he cannot quite believe Stiles had the audacity to put his hand anywhere near his person, nor actually say something like that to his face. His eyes flash bright icy-blue, just for a second, and it sends chills crawling all over Stiles’s skin.

Quick as a snake, Derek throws forward his hand, grabs Stiles by the collar and pulls him close until their faces are almost nose to nose and Stiles can see nothing beyond his fierce scowl, then pushes him against the hood of his own Jeep. Stiles winces and thinks it’s gonna bruise.

“You’re funny.” Stiles finds that even being called an idiot had less _condescension_ in its tone. Derek lets him go and studies him with an unreadable expression. “When your friend loses control and fucks you up, I will leave flowers at your grave.”

And Stiles knows that can never happen—but not because Scott will never lose it. For a second the memory of his claws and fangs makes Stiles break out in cold sweat, and he wonders if someone _shouldn’t_ teach Scott to put a leash on his powers. Because dreams of friendship up to senility aside (a future that is highly questionable right now because they might not actually live that long), Stiles can’t spend the rest of his life holding Scott’s hand on full moons. Sooner or later, when their lives are taking their due course, it will become very awkward and very hard to cover up. Scott needs to learn to get by on his own, that much is obvious. Derek Hale is just the worst possible teacher.

Derek Hale is _all_ kinds of unpleasant things, really. In fact, if Stiles were to make a _‘like’/ ~~‘dislike’~~ ‘vehemently fucking HATE’_ list about Derek, there’d be only one item he’d put in the first column—and the jury’s still out on whether or not he should. Because that trait, that one quality, while admirable in its own right, is still pretty damned unlikable: for all that he’s secretive and private and an asshole, Derek is not a liar.

Derek Hale is brutally honest. Not with his bullshit threats which are, yeah, technically true, because there’s possibly twenty different ways he could kill Stiles at any given moment, and that thought is a little terrifying. But this is about when he’s being depressingly unapologetically realistic. When he tells Scott, _Yeah, you’re probably gonna kill somebody, because you’re new and you can’t be bothered to listen to me—_ except not in so many words because Derek also doesn’t do talking (add that to the column of his many faults).

“Guy sure knows how to make friends,” he comments later to Scott, relating to him the bump-in he had with Derek.

Scott, being Scott, says, “I feel kinda bad for him.”

Stiles snorts, not really moved by the lone gunslinger act. If Derek’s alone, it’s his own damn fault for driving people away—a craft he seems to be masterful at. They don’t yet know that all of Derek’s friends are dead.

 

***

 

On the night of the full moon Scott keeps looking at him with an expression of patent confidence and hope, trusting Stiles to keep him safe from himself and harmless to others. But because they’re not sure, they still use the chains to bind him to the radiator.

When they’re children, they read tales of giants and monsters shackled in unbreakable bonds of metal and spells. Reenacting it now, with Scott cast in the role of one of the bad guys, leaves a sour taste in Stiles’s mouth. He shoves his feelings aside and restrains him dutifully, putting ropes of chain in circles across Scott’s chest, tying him to the pipes, allowing for only the smallest movement of his wrists.

When he’s done, he sits across from Scott and takes his hand in his, staring at him determinedly. It takes ten seconds for the utter ludicrousness of their position to settle in.

“This feels stupid,” Scott says with an uneasy grin and twists his wrist with discomfort.

“Yeah. Totally lame,” Stiles agrees, dropping his hand, and makes several dopey hand waves trying to preoccupy his limbs with something. Scott looks half-amused half-mystified.

“Just, do it when the change starts,” he proposes, putting on a brave face.

“Good idea!” Stiles nods eagerly. The pause that hangs is still full of awkward. He fumbles his thumbs a bit, then adds belatedly with a deadpan face. “Just don’t phrase it like something weird, okay, because I don’t want to have an image of you all sweaty and panting and saying something lie ‘Do it,’ in my head.”

Scott laughs, grimacing. “Oh, that’s so _wrong_! Stiles! Shut up.” He moves to punch Stiles in mock outrage, and the chains jangle, keeping him back. His face momentarily freezes and his lips form a surprised _‘O’_ as he remembers his situation, and he exhales his remaining laughter in a sigh of resignation and settles back.

Stiles’s grin fades and he clears his throat. Holding hands may be lame and awkward, but sitting in your friend’s bedroom when he is chained to a freaking radiator is just unreal.

Scott closes his eyes and Stiles watches him try to relax against what have to be sharp and uncomfortable edges of the pipes. Scott pretends he isn’t bothered. “Tell me a story,” he asks.

“A story?” Stiles echoes, and his mind’s coming up blank.

“Yeah. You know. One of those your mom used to tell you.”

In spite of everything, Stiles smiles: that one’s easy. He doesn’t talk of her often, not even to Scott. (Not even to his dad.) Privately, he’s been remembering her a lot lately, wondering if she knew what she was passing onto him. If she, too, was once only seventeen and discovering something impossible. If she hoped he would never have to find out. Or if the supernatural has avoided her life completely and she has lived in perfect order and blissful ignorance. The questions come and go almost easily now, the pain of losing her dampened by the years, and worrying old wounds doesn’t pose the danger of reopening them.

He used to repeat every tale his mother told him before sleep back to Scott, empowered by the secret knowledge he was sharing. After she’s gone, he finds her books, tracing the pages reverently and knowing she touched them as well, and he spends time carefully memorizing every word until they’re ingrained in him—so that they’re a part of him and he can never lose that, even if he lost her.

They’re long past the age of enjoying childhood fancies, except tonight it is a comfort to be pulled back into those memories when life was simple and good.

_“The north wind was blowing, and red and golden the last days of autumn were streaming hence. Solemn and cold over the marshes arose the evening. It became very still…”_

Words pour out of him in a meaningless upbeat torrent for a while, one tale seamlessly merging into another, and Scott keeps his eyes closed, his face slack, like maybe he’s asleep, and still Stiles doesn’t stop—until he hears a faint uncouth sound. Stiles falls silent and for a moment thinks he imagined it. But when he looks up at Scott, his friend’s eyes are wide open and completely awake.

“It’s starting,” he says in a hoarse whisper that already sounds more beast than man.

Stiles takes a deep breath, steeling himself, and takes Scott by his hand. It’s shaking ever so slightly. It is not awkward any more but urgent and edging on desperate, and Stiles can only pray that it works. He kneads Scott’s damp palm in both hands.

“Is it working?”

“Seems to be?” Scott pants, and it comes out as a question, because they’re both groping blindly and cluelessly in the dark. “It’s like there’s a volcano wanting to erupt out of me, but there’s a dome over it that’s not letting it out.”

Sweat stands out on Scott’s forehead, and he squeezes Stiles’s hand in a way that should be painful, but makes Stiles deliriously relieved. Because he has seen Scott clawed-out and slashing his arms and punching through metal lockers, and he knows that in this moment Scott is squeezing him with normal human strength.

 

***

 

Because they are idiots and the world is black-and-white, to go snooping around the Hale property seems like a _stellar_ idea. The place is just gristles and ashes, a scar on the landscape of Beacon Hills that the municipal office can’t find the funds to mow down. It’s a little scary that Derek elects to be holed up here, like it’s an actual _home_. Whether someone lives there or not, it has lost any right to be called a home a good long while ago.

Scott leaves Stiles on watch, and he hangs around the front porch, feeling like he’s in a Burton-induced nightmare and artificial fog is about to creep all around him. Hearing twigs snapping spookily in the woods, Stiles considers summoning Scott by way of a girlish scream.

He watches the trees and for a second it seems to him that he sees a flash of wolf eyes, maybe a dash of fur, and with a sharp hissing inhale he turns around sharply, wanting to retreat into the house.

He runs into the human wall that is Derek Hale. The permanent frown that seems to be fixed on his face at all times grows even darker—if such a thing is possible.

“What are you doing here?” he demands. His voice cuts like a knife, razor-sharp and abrupt.

“Just—I—walking. What are **_you_** doing here?” Stiles is great at rambling. Not so great at lying.

Derek doesn’t deem answering his inane question necessary and looks about his house. “Is the other half of your Hardy boys act in there?” he asks.

“Scott who?” Because that’s just masterful brilliant deflection.

Derek narrows his eyes, and Stiles knows he is being reckless and courting danger but he cannot help the desire, like a bee sting, to push Derek’s buttons.

He knows Derek’s super werewolf senses are tingling and he’s about to put his animal hearing to use. So to top one brilliant idea with another Stiles grabs his hand. Slowly and menacingly, Derek turns around. Stiles thinks he’s about to make laser-holes in him with those eyes.

“What are you doing?” Derek stares at his hand like he wants to bite it off. It takes all of Stiles’s restraint not to let go.

“I—uhm—nice watch!” he exclaims and brings his face closer to stare at the piece on Derek’s wrist. Which is hardly a mechanical marvel. “What—Is it, like, Armani? What does it do?”

Behind Derek he sees Scott jumping out of one of the windows and making for the woods. While his eyes are glued to Scott’s retreating back, Derek shakes him off his arm like mud. Stiles topples down on his ass which would be embarrassing, except it allots him the perfect opportunity to loudly complain and extend his hand demandingly. Derek narrows his eyes at Stiles, then pulls him up. He still towers over him menacingly. Stiles doesn’t let go of his grip, and they are crowding each other’s personal space.

“What were you doing here?”

“Investigating?”

“Without your trusty sidekick?”

“I’m the Sheriff’s son, it’s kind generally more my area.”

“And this area is off-limits, so get the hell out of here.” He shakes off Stiles’ hand again.

He staggers a few safe steps backwards. “Yup. Awesum plan. And so I will.”

His heart is pounding out his fear all the way to the road, and there is nothing preventing Derek from hearing his fear.

 

***

 

Jackson is an arrogant idiot any day of the week. Why he couldn’t continue being an idiot about Scott and his secret is a mystery. Suffice it to say that fate appears to think they don’t have enough on their plate.

Jackson stops by Scott’s locker, theatrically pretending to be preoccupied with anything but him and says, “I know what you are.”

Stiles slams the locker door disturbingly hard, and both of them turn to stare at Jackson. Neither can play nonchalant when a bomb like this is dropped on them.

“What do you mean?” Scott says, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

Jackson smirks and pats him on the shoulder. “Relax, McCall. I’m not gonna tell. I just want you to make me one as well.”

Scott stands very still. Stiles’s palms are sweating. He fervently hopes that _holy shit!_ isn’t written over both their faces in big red letters. He wonders which heartbeat is louder to Scott right now: Stiles’s or his own.

“One of what?” Scott echoes, his voice dry as sandpaper.

Jackson’s grin is positively shit-eating. “How’s the full moon treating you?” he asks instead. Scott hisses in a breath, and Jackson laughs quietly. The bastard seems to have all the aces. In fact, he’s not even concerned with not showing his hand. If he were a bigger idiot he might have tried to _force_ Scott into giving him the bite: a physical confrontation Scott could have easily handled and instilled the righteous fear of God into him. But Jackson’s not an imbecile—he’s just a tool. He threatens Scott with exposure instead.

“He will try to injure you during practice,” Stiles scuttles over to Scott, sharing his observations after a day of watching Jackson with prejudice. Doesn’t take a genius, really. “I can tell he’s planning something.”

“So what? I can heal,” Scott says obliviously, and Stiles shakes his head because _really_ , sometimes it’s like Scott has cotton balls instead of a brain. In his mind, the memory of Derek staring down at him darkly is still fresh. _What if they see him shift?_ Derek has asked. _What will you do then, huh? You think that the fact that it’s the twenty-first century is gonna prevent some genius from starting a witch-hunt?_

He looks at his friend wryly. “That’s precisely the problem, Einstein.”

Scott doesn’t handle the stressful news well: by the time the game begins they don’t need any interference from Jackson to expose Scott for who he is—his nerves are about to do the job splendidly on their own.

Stiles observes all the going-ons from his usual seated position among other substitutes. He has never before been glad for being benched. Today it allows him the perfect opportunity to do nothing but watch out for whatever prison shanking move Jackson has in mind. He sees it coming from mile away: a foul move—precisely the type Jackson would know to incapacitate the enemy during real games, and normally it produces in Scott and Stiles sort of this delighted rage: somewhere in between of _‘how dares he play dirty’_ and _‘it’s so damned good, though, that we have won’_. Today no one can win. The agenda is not the team agenda but Jackson’s. Stiles starts running before Scott even goes down.

“Motherfucker!” Scott does not get up from his knees, nursing the injured hand, and others hush, throwing cautious glances at the coach because this isn’t exactly school-appropriate language.

Stiles doesn’t care that he’s tripping over himself, digging fountains of wet earth. All he cares is dropping at his friend’s side, grabbing his uninjured hand, and he feels like shit, because Scott jerks his chin up, and meets his eyes, and looks _miserable_. He’s in bitch-ass pain, and if Stiles lets go then he will heal and it will be all over. But everything else will also be all over.

“Quit bawling, McCall,” Jackson snorts from somewhere above their heads. “We both know there’s nothing there.”

Scott just sputters and pants.

“Jackson, cut it out,” Allison shoots him a dirty look. “Can’t you see he’s hurt bad?” She tucks her hair behind her ear and kneels by Scott’s side, as close as Stiles, and she glances at him meaningfully because three’s a crowd and rules of relationships say she’s supposed to be the one to console him. Stiles pretends like he’s an idiot and doesn’t budge an inch.

“I wonder how that happened?” Jackson keeps on coming, his tone filled with innocent curiosity. “Why don’t you show us, McCall, huh? Do you suppose they’ll think you’re faking? Will the coach cut you from first line?”

Allison’s brows knit together at the smug insinuations in Jackson’s voice. “What is he talking about, Scott?” she asks softly.

“I… honestly… don’t know,” Scott pants out.

Allison sighs and casts Jackson’s accusations aside as completely irrelevant. “Here, let me see.”

Scott presses his arm to his chest, shaking his head like a child. Stiles covertly places his hand on the scruff of his neck, keeping their skin in contact, before letting go of Scott’s hand. They both get up from the dirt.

Scott’s wrist looks broken and swells the size of Jackson’s ego. The skin is torn, and the bleeding doesn’t look about to stop. Jackson’s eyes widen comically, and he grabs at Scott’s wounded hand. Scott hisses in protest, yanking it back. The way Jackson’s face elongates is worth it, though. “No! Why aren’t you _healing_?”

“Healing?” Scott makes a face at him—his trademark priceless face of dense confusion that Stiles wants to smooch him for right now. “What?” His expression turns into one of faux suspicion. “Are you _high_?”

If Jackson had any real possibility of becoming a werewolf, his answering growl would have been very promising. As it is, it makes Stiles snort happily. His fingers tighten around Scott’s neck.

“Told you…” Scott shrugs apologetically, as Jackson storms off, and looks sheepishly at Allison, who is a little confused but doesn’t ask about the exchange, shelving it under the mental hashtag _#boys are often stupid and don’t make much sense_.

“He’s a dick,” she declares in a tone of superiority, and Scott laughs in surprise.

“McCall!” the coach booms. “Don’t just wave that around, it’s anti-sanitary. Go to the nurse’s office, and I expect you to be here tomorrow, you got that? I didn’t make you first line so that you’d break your arm on me. Go!”

Scott grins at Allison even wider, and she hides a coy smile into her shoulder.

They do not make it to the nurse’s office: as soon as they’re off the field and make sure Jackson is not lurking around, Stiles finally drops his hand, and Scott mutters, “Oh, thank God,” and winces as his cells reassemble themselves. He will still wear gauze around his hand for a few days, pretending it’s really tender—at least for his girlfriend’s benefit. The coach will be incredibly pleased when by the time of the game Scott is in tiptop shape, as promised.

“Look at McCall, you whiney babies, nursing all your boo-boos like I’m a kindergarten nanny. That’s a dog eat dog world out there, you hear me? Dog. Eat. Dog.”

Stiles gets an earful for laughing too hard at that comment.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t have a shortage of words when it comes to describing Derek Hale. The first one that springs to mind is _‘excrutiating’_ because it encompasses all of his feelings at once. From rage to fear, to confusion to aggravation—everything about Derek is like a torturous pain of having one’s teeth and nails pulled out.

“I told you this would happen.”

Scott is loose somewhere in the forest. They have accounted for the full moon but didn’t take into consideration every other night, where Scott—young and impetuous and not controlling his abilities but rather being controlled by them—can shift without warning and make for the woods. Which he did, and now he and Derek have to search for him before he does something terrible. Stiles doesn’t think he will but Derek isn’t so optimistic.

“Really?” Stiles grouses, kicking the earth with his boot. “You’re an _‘I-told-you-so’_ kinda guy?”

Derek turns to him and grabs him by the shoulder, shoving him into the bark of the nearest tree. Stiles winces as it scratches him through the fabric. “And what kind of a guy are you? Scott is dangerous like this, he will hurt somebody tonight, and all you do is make stupid jokes.” His eyes bore into Stiles for a few prolonged seconds and then he shakes his head and releases him.

He is always wearing a _‘God-grant-me-the-patience-to-deal-with-these-fools’_ expression. Like he’s somehow better, _wiser_ than them—something Stiles considers very debatable. And Derek’s eyes are ablaze—not with the werewolf glow, but with a kind of fever. They’re always like that, Stiles realizes when he takes a pause to actually think about it. Like he’s sick.

(Stiles thinks he’s about to be sick. Maybe vomit his crushed windpipe out into the dirt.)

“You two imbeciles think you can figure it all out by yourselves but you don’t know the half of the mess Scott’s in. I was born into being a werewolf and Scott hasn’t. He has no idea how it is to have an animal trapped inside.”

Stiles tries to unknit the tension in his shoulders. According to Scott, Derek has a penchant for throwing guys around and shoving them into walls, hand on the verge of growing claws pressing into their necks. Stiles rubs his chest where Derek has shoved him and tries not to take it personally.

What he tries is to look unimpressed—which turns out to be challenging, because Derek does nothing _but_ impress on him what a menace he is, and Stiles’s skin is prickling with hot tingly fear. There is a part of his brain that freezes with the notion that he’s prey and he wants nothing more than to run and hide under the bed.

“Did you come along **_just_** to slow me down?” Derek hails him icily. “You asked for this, so keep up.”

Stiles scowls, forcing the unflattering desire down. He’s a freaking preternatural. He’s supposed to be the hunter here, not the other way around. It is Derek who should be running for cover and trembling there and having fucking nightmares that Stiles will come and steal all his mighty powers away. Even if he doesn’t know it.

He tries to loom as impressively as Derek does, but his thin gangly complexion and the fact that he’s a little green in the face fail to win him any threat points.

Another word he’d use to describe Derek Hale is _‘incensing’_ : both because of his singular ability to inflame others to the point of boiling—and not in any flattering sense of awakening their noble rage but like an infected **_wound_** —and also because of the way he always seems aflame, like the fire that burnt away his family is still raging on inside him.

 

***

 

On the topic of wolfing out: whenever in Derek’s company, Stiles is in terrible suspension over the fact, watching for signs, if perhaps Derek’s canines are showing, straining to remember how close they are to full moon. (He learns the lunar calendar soon enough: in a werewolf-infested environment knowing such things is paramount.)

He isn’t sure why but he doesn’t want Derek to know what he can do. Because he doesn’t trust that Derek won’t freak out. Won’t look upon Stiles as his personal _accursed_ Kryptonite. Won’t try to eradicate him with vehemence. Because he trusts Scott enough to spend a sleepless full moon night with him, holding his hand, but not Derek who abhors any kind of contact and looks about ready to break Stiles’s arm when he gets too handsy (which is his usual _modus operandi_ and it grates on his nerves that suddenly it’s a problem), and frankly Stiles doesn’t exactly wish any such physical proximity with the guy either.

Derek Hale makes him uncomfortable. Makes him freeze inside. Makes him sweat fucking bullets. Derek Hale hoards secrets and is unforthcoming as fuck and is all around a _maddening_ person. The last thing he breeds is trust, and Stiles will be damned if he lets Derek near his secret. The cost of that might just be too steep.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t particularly like Derek—a fact he makes perfectly evident by way of snark. Stiles’s snark, in fact, has a life of his own, because Stiles, at times, is stupidly terrified of Derek, but his snark never is. In fact, his snark is possibly the offspring of too many nights spent on the web where you can be that anonymous faceless chatty weirdo and completely get away with it.

Derek who’s bleeding all over his car Stiles dislikes and fears even more. Because that’s not the usual Derek-murder-vibe, but more of a he-looks-about-to-drop-dead situation. Of course, even with ashen skin and looking like he’s got one foot in the grave already, Derek manages to grunt out his usual parade of threats and invectives, ranging from _‘Do it before I bash your brains in,’_ to _‘Do it, if you don’t want to get bit.’_

Stomping on breaks, Stiles pulls over and twists in his seat, giving Derek a dirty look. “Don’t you go barking orders at me in that tone of voice, you…” he pauses and flails, searching for a particularly insulting word, “you overgrown _puppy!_ I am not a wolf you can just alpha into submission, or whatever.”

Derek stares, exhausted and having no time for everything _Stiles_ about Stiles.

“Yeah! I bet I could take you right now, and drag your ass out of my car and leave you on the curb,” Stiles stares at him, feeling cruelly unsympathetic to Derek’s perils. Takes a special kind of asshole to antagonize people to the point where they’re not even sorry when you’re dying.

“Drive,” Derek tells him in a low voice, “or I’ll rip your throat open. With my teeth.”

Stiles is battling a very petty but inwardly satisfying thought of doing exactly what he just threatened and just leave him—see what he’ll do then. Because he is pretty sure that were Stiles a normal teenage boy, his threats wouldn’t hold much merit, but being the preternatural that he is, while Derek is poisoned and weak, more so were Stiles to touch him, Stiles has the upper hand now.

Derek is lucky Stiles is only petty in his inner petulant fantasies. He starts up the car.

 

***

 

Stiles sometimes wonders how his life would have changed if _he’d_ been given the bite. Would it be an all-cure to his problems? Because Scott keeps whining but Stiles is pretty sure his friend’s life got significantly better. Or would he be the first werewolf with ADHD in the history of werewolfhood, and wouldn’t that just turn his life into a dark comedy?

He is not about to complain about how it turned out. As far as Stiles is concerned, they are living the dream—the distant fancies he mused of through the nights of his childhood have become reality. The world is not ordinary and boring; Stiles is not ordinary and boring. And he’ll be damned if he’s gonna bemoan his fate like a goddamn Peter Parker—like being saddled with superpowers is so horrible. He loves every second of it.

Well, almost every second. If he’s being entirely honest, being best friends with a werewolf has consequences that are sometimes awesome and sometimes pretty terrible. An example of awesome: werewolves-are-real-holyshit freakout, hashtag _#real life adventures_ , hashtag _#i’m kinda badass now_. On the other hand, best-friend-trying-to-kill-me clause, _‘my life as a character on the twilight zone’_ addendum, and a full moon phobia (like he needed a new one) are pretty much terrible.

Stiles doesn’t mind the terrible. He’s great at adapting. And magical life is no fun without great perils to overcome.

 

***

 

“Help me up,” Derek mutters, tangled in the sleeves of his shirt. If there should be a response to the curve of the musculature of his body, Stiles isn’t aware: he’s too focused on the _smoking freaking **wound**_ on Derek’s arm.

The words sound helpless—bad helpless, _drunk_ helpless. Stiles cannot even scrape around for jokes anymore, and swings Derek’s arm across his shoulders, letting him lean on himself. He can barely support the mass of Derek’s body, but Derek cannot support his own weight at all, and Stiles drags him inside unceremoniously, like a sack of flour. As soon as Derek is able to drop into a half-seated position, he shoves Stiles away, and the lack of verbal abuse is the only thanks he gets.

Derek leans against the table, cradling his injured arm. The blood is oozing out of the gunshot wound, garish and watery. The veins leading up to the wound have turned black; the venom seems to have spread to Derek’s fingers and is now working its way up the arm to his shoulder. Stiles makes a muffled protesting noise through his lips and looks away.

He starts talking. Ramble-ramble-ramble, falling into the comfortable pretend-security of nervous humor because he’s afraid to ask what their worst case scenario is.

“When the infection reaches my heart, it’ll kill me,” Derek provides helpfully, and Stiles hasn’t even asked, Derek probably just wants him to shut up but Stiles ignores him. Distracting them both with annoying blabber seems like a way better option than giving into Derek’s compulsory depression.

He chokes on his breath when Derek turns to him, holding a saw blade in his healthy hand. Those consequences, that are sometimes awesome and sometimes terrible? Both definitely include: one Derek Hale.

“I don’t know about this— _eek_!”

Derek reaches out and grabs the front of his shirt, pulling Stiles forward ungracefully and bringing him almost nose to nose with himself. Stiles stumbles and almost falls face first into the table. Derek doesn’t see it: he has his eyes closed from another surge of pain. Stiles doubts he would care either way.

“Okay. Okay. Fine. I’m doing it,” he mutters and steels himself. It’s not like he hasn’t seen grotesque in his life, because he has. He has seen photos of the crime scenes his dad investigates—more murders as of late since supernatural is trickling into the life of this town. He has seen Scott change into a shaggy animal and run off into the woods, where Derek had to catch him and Stiles got an earful about that, like it says somewhere that he’s certified as Scott’s keeper. He has seen Laura Hale’s severed body.

The thought of taking the saw blade and chopping off someone’s arm, though, makes him realize that he would be the redshirt who dies first in a Tarantino movie because _no way_ he can do this. He wonders, helplessly, if a werewolf can regrow a full limb, pressing the blade to Derek’s skin, just above the cobweb of his black veins, and it’s too high, too damn close to his shoulder, he will actually lose his whole arm to it, how will he live without his fucking arm?

“Wait, wait!”

It hits him like an epiphany and he’s totally having the _‘There’s no wood!—Are you a witch or not, Hermione?’_ moment. He doesn’t believe it, but under the stress of it all he completely forgot—

He drops the saw. It is momentarily wholly terrifying to him how close he came to chopping off Derek’s arm.

“Stiles…” Derek scowls in frustration.

“Will it poison a human?” Stiles demands, and it must seem like it’s completely out of the blue. “Your monkshood?”

“What?” Derek snaps, and Stiles is all but dancing on one spot eagerly.

“Derek, will it affect _me?_ ”

Derek makes an unintelligible sound in the back of his throat. “You’re worried about _yourself_?” he spits out. “No, dickhead. It’s werewolf-only.”

“Good,” Stiles blurts out, and he doesn’t really care about checking himself and his choice of words, because he’s about to do something really stupid, and Derek will figure it all out anyway. (Derek’s eyes still flash hurtfully evil at him.) “Give me your arm.”

Derek sets it on the table again with a heavy thud, thinking Stiles will finally do as he’s told and cut it off, but Stiles inhales sharply and just prays it works, because if it doesn’t, he’ll only lose precious time, and explaining his sudden molestation is not something he wants to do with Derek Hale, like, ever.

He grabs him by the forearm, one palm circling around Derek’s wrist, the other close to the elbow.

“What the hell are you doing?” Derek snarls, or at least his words vaguely sound like that, because they are mostly swallowed by the growl of pain when Stiles’s hand disturbs the bullet wound.

 _Please,_ Stiles thinks, desperately—and Derek is already yanking his arm away—and then it is happening.

Derek goes all still, his eyes widening in an almost ridiculous cartoonish fashion—and it is _astonishing_ how his face is transformed by looking hesitant instead of his trademark menacing—and then he gingerly sets his arm down, staring at it in incredulity. Much to Stiles’s relief, his black veins seem to be receding.

“How are you doing this?” Derek asks quietly, and for once his tone isn’t aggressive or pushy or whatever it is Derek Hale carries in his arsenal of being a bully and a generally dickish person.

“Uh,” Stiles says eloquently, and he’s staring into Derek’s eyes that are suddenly so completely vulnerable, and then he hurries to drop his eyes back to the table, mumbling, “we should probably wait for Scott. ‘Cause, you know, he’s bringing the cure, and I’m not it, and I can’t be stuck to you forever, and I’m pretty sure Murphy’s Law is about to kick in in some form, like one of us having a full bladder or something, and I’m not that charitable as to hold your hand while one of us takes a leak, and why are you not stopping me _shitfuck_ —” he slams his knee against the underside of the table and seals his lips shut with a muffled ‘hmngh’ sound. Probably not in time to spare himself some potentially humiliating sentences.

He realizes he’s squeezing Derek’s arm strong enough to stop _any_ blood flow entirely, but Derek doesn’t seem too phased. As Stiles steals a careful glance at him, he sees realization dawning on his face. “You’re—”

“Don’t!—” Stiles cuts him off abruptly, “—say it. Don’t say ‘soulless’. That’s not nice, you know…” He cuts himself off before he has an urge to go off on another humiliating monologue.

“Preternatural,” Derek says instead. The word is different coming from him, rolling off his tongue like something mystical.

“Give a man a gold star!” Stiles feigns wry amusement, where in fact he is flooded with painful embarrassment.

Derek says nothing and stares at Stiles’s hands like they are a miracle on par with Midas’s touch, or something. His face is so unguarded and confused, it fills Stiles with helplessness because he’s supposed to feel righteously pissed, that’s what Derek Hale usually _makes_ him feel. But not right now.

Stiles knows he’s been privately wondering what this revelation will do to them. Privately, he has thought Derek will be dismissive, or punishing, or resentful; even respectful in his wildest dreams. But he’s never expected him to be amazed.

Derek’s looking at him with a full realization of what Stiles has just admitted to. His eyes are saying it as clear as day: _You didn’t have to_. And Stiles thinks back at him, blinking rapidly, his lower lip convulsing like he wants to say it out loud: _You would have died._

Something fundamental changes between them presently, softening the edges of Derek and bringing out in him something steadfast and calm that Stiles would never have guessed was there.

“Stop staring, it’s rude,” is all he mutters out loud, and as his body relaxes a little bit, so do his fingers around Derek’s forearm. Derek starts in his chair, mistaking it for Stiles’s intention to let go, and he curls the fingers tighter automatically.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, keeping his tone merry, even as the circumstances are anything but.

 

***

 

If Stiles is being entirely honest, there is something about his power that instills in him a basic, visceral fear.

He has long since abandoned belief in anything as fickle and cruel as an entity that takes away your family, that allows the tragedy of death, that has left him alone. But he believes in something. Just like he has believed there’s more to the world he lives in, he believes there’s something after death too. Not a chorus of cherubs, or anything, ‘cause that’s just idiotic. But, simply… more.

Sometimes these days he think that whatever more there is… might not be for him.

_How do you find out if you do have a soul?_

 

***

 

“I’ve heard stories,” Derek says, his tone of voice not openly aggressive for once. His mouth is still set in a disapproving scowl.

“Oh. What kind?” Stiles’s throat scratches and he coughs, trying to sound normal and unaffected.

“Of curse-breakers…” Derek’s eyes look at nothing in the room but into himself, reaching a long distance back, remembering. Stiles is momentarily reminded of his mother telling him her stories by his bedside. He wonders who told Derek his stories.

Derek’s stories are of course nothing like Stiles’s. They are as morbid as everything else about him.

“They called what you did, what you _do_ ,” Derek amends, stumbling over the tense because he has never expected to refer to this ability as a fact, “curse-breaking. They used to call what happens to us a prison. Because once a month imprisoned we are. And the rest of our existence has to be leashed.” This time, as Derek looks at Stiles, his gaze no longer passes through him but lands, heavy and accusatory. “There are stories of werewolves giving away that leash. So desperately plagued by who they were that they saw your kind as a cure. Stories of wolves who turned themselves into pets and **_hunted_** their own for the payment of a preternatural’s gift.”

Stiles flushes deep red, ashamed even though it is not his fault. Even though he hasn’t asked for this, even though he doesn’t want to dangle this power over Derek’s head.

“Your kind has almost been the end of mine.”

Stiles looks away, not sure what his reaction is supposed to be here. He can’t very well make excuses for something he has never done. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not gonna make you hunt your own.”

Derek looks at him with dark amusement that Stiles interprets as _‘As if you could force me to do **anything**.’_ He wonders, too, if it is the loss of dignity and the humiliation, the betrayal of that choice that make Derek so angry. Or if privately Derek’s contemplating (hopelessly, jealously) the possibility of a life without his curse.

 

***

 

It has always been an unspoken rule that in school Stiles and Scott sit in hearing distance of one other, because making smartass comments to each other about their periods is a way of life. It has now become imperative that they also sit one behind the other, because Scott keeps losing it, sometimes during class, and Stiles has to grab his arm so that Scott doesn’t go all _Wolf Man Junior_ on them, ‘cause nobody wants that sequel in the middle of their classroom.

When Allison cuts him off one day to sit behind Scott instead and there’s no seat in front, Stiles spends the entire period having a minor stroke because holding hands across the row if a crisis strikes isn’t subtle or fucking feasible.

When Scott gets worked up enough that Stiles can see the claws extending on his freely hanging arm, he’s ready to not just fake a seizure so that the medical emergency will draw attention away from Scott, but actually have a seizure as his heart quietly gives out, waving the droopy white flag of defeat.

When Scott’s anger fit ceases just as suddenly as it began and Stiles sees that the cause of it is Allison’s touching his arm instead of himself, he finds he doesn’t know what to think.

He spends several hours seriously invested in a theory that Allison is also _soulless_.

She’s really not. She’s a human being, extraordinary only to Scott’s warped perspective, and the only person she’s “soulless” for is him. Because in the end what the _soulless_ are is also _selfless_. You take a person’s hand into yours and with it his life, and you share their burden, you take away their flaws. And therein lies the fine line between friendship and commitment. Stiles could never be this selfless for Scott, nor would Scott be comfortable with it if he offered. What would have been a sacrifice for Stiles is only intimacy for Allison.

She and not Stiles can be “soulless” for Scott. Can hold his hand throughout the night and keep him grounded and it won’t be a sacrifice for either of them because they’re in love. And on full moon she could lock the door and keep the key close to her heart and it would have worked for them, somehow it would. And maybe Stiles is confusing metaphysics and private fancies with his own secret fears and some horrible sentimentality, but that is what love is, he supposes—going through life hand in hand with someone. Scott and Stiles have each other, have their friendship and that will never change. But it will also never be enough.

 

***

 

Now that Derek is clued into the fact that Stiles is not supernaturally handicapped, Stiles gets to sit in on their private get-togethers. There he comes to realize he’s not the only one who dislikes Derek Hale. Scott can barely tolerate his teaching techniques. And he completely disregards every other, non-werewolf advice Derek has to spare.

Half the time Scott will get so mad he starts changing involuntarily. Stiles still can’t figure out if Derek’s that bad of a teacher, or if it’s a tool to make Scott learn about control and keeping a cool head, regardless of the moon.

One time, during an especially loud argument, Derek shifts just to prove a point. His change is polished. Seems effortless even though Scott has described it as the worst pain he has lived through. Stiles has seen him writhe and whimper when he shifts, but Derek is smooth, almost melting from one form into another. Fur crawls from his head over his entire body as he crouches, bones rearranging into a lupine form.

He’s a large man, all muscle and strength. The wolf he makes is likewise massive, conservation of mass still keeping the world a little bit more sane. He’s almost pitch black, with icy blue eyes, and bigger than any natural wolf is as far as Stiles’s knowledge of biology goes. Compared to him, Scott looks almost a puppy: considerably smaller, with large indelicate paws, covered in dark rusty-brown fur frosted red about the neck and shoulders. He loses it and shifts plenty—which is why Stiles is allowed to be here: because Scott hasn’t learnt to shift back.

When the arguments grow hostile, Stiles knows he should probably stay out of it—better for one’s health not to mess with the werewolves. But it’s in his nature to intervene.

“You don’t get to dictate how I live my life just because I’m like you now! Stop projecting your issues on me and deal with your own problems!”

“I **_am_** dealing. **_You_** ’re my problem to deal with, Scott. You’re an _idiot_. And untrained, and a danger. But I don’t consider it reason enough to let the hunters end your pitiful existence.”

“She’s worth it!” Because of course Scott is that type of chivalric hero who will go the distance for a girl. Stiles really isn’t surprised about that, but Derek has yet to learn that telling Scott to give up Allison is like telling the state of Illinois to give up Pluto as a planet. And Scott is yet to learn that Derek doesn’t take no for an answer.

Derek’s eyes become icy-blue, a thin dark contour about the rim of each iris, and his lip curls up. Two of his perfect white teeth turn pointed. Scott’s face changes and he growls, crouching. Stiles’s mouth goes dry with stupid fear. He should stay away, he knows he should, but when has he ever listened to his own advice.

“Whoa whoa, Fight Club, we are **_not_** doing this, alright? No cage fights. We’re all adults.” Even though they’re not.

Stiles doesn’t allow them to argue the point, stuffing himself in between and making a grab for the both of them. He manages to grasp Scott’s wrist and then is momentarily stumped as to what patch of Derek’s skin he should attempt to latch onto: somehow, the prospect of meeting his fist with an open palm seems like it will yield no result aside from broken finger bones. Desperately, Stiles reaches for the front of Derek’s shirt, snaking his fingers onto his collarbone.

Derek looks murderously down on Stiles’s offending hand. To say that he hates being touched would be putting it _very_ mildly.

But when he looks back up, his features are completely human, which is only a _small_ relief because it doesn’t promise Derek will not want to inflict some bodily harm—just that he will be entirely not supernatural when he administers it.

Stiles finds himself alarmingly unafraid of the prospect: he is too distracted by the fact that despite his hand lying high on Derek’s sternum, he can feel Derek’s werewolf heart beating loudly inside.

“Let’s discuss it like normal people, alright?” he proposes in order to fill the pause with something. “Can we do that?” It’s a poor choice of words.

“We can’t, Stiles,” Derek says coldly and steps away, looking over at Scott. “We’re **_not_** normal. You should learn to accept that.”

 

***

 

Stiles has never been much for labels. He is not a jock, not a bookworm, not a skate-rolling crackhead, not a triple A, not an anything-insert-subculture-here. Not a whatever bumper sticker you want to put on him. He’s just Stiles, angular and unconforming and not fitting into the neat tiny boxes of society.

‘Soulless’ is the first box he falls into squarely, and even so, it’s not a _defining_ moment of his character. Nevertheless, abiding by it changes him. Not the label itself but the implications that come along, unwarranted. Suddenly, things like school become only of relative importance, and education is a secular matter, because at the age of seventeen he already has enough sense to know that some things will not be useful in life at all.

With their parade of supernatural problems, being happy at finally making it to the lacrosse field seems a distant memory, more surreal than the fact that there’s a murderous Alpha running around. Definitely more surreal than Derek Hale who apparently allows Stiles around only in a capacity of a whipping boy.

“Maybe we should just bait your Alpha to us and be done with it.”

Derek looks torn between about a dozen of scathing comebacks. _Maybe you should stop wasting oxygen. Yes, by all means, let’s ‘be done with it’, because the three of us will easily take him on. No sweat._ The pause lingers, and in the end Derek doesn’t grace Stiles with a response. He needn’t bother, as Stiles can read them in his face clear enough.

“Just an idea,” he mumbles.

“Yeah,” Derek scoffs. “A terrible one.”

“Why? Because it’s mine?” Stiles asks peevishly, and means: _you hate all ideas that come from me_.

“Yes,” Derek replies without humor, and means: _you are incapable of producing good ones._ “Which is a surprise: aren’t you supposed to be _sensible_? Since you don’t have a soul.”

Stiles turns white at that comment and then turns to leave. He does so, uninterrupted: Derek stays behind and doesn’t stop him. Stiles isn’t sure if he’s thankful or aggravated: sometimes it looks like they might be able to build real rapport, but then Derek goes and reminds him that he’s actually a massive _uncaring_ dickhead.

Which is why he’s sulking at the dinner table in his own house, exchanges painful smiles with his dad, and feels like an idiot and a goddamn liar. The worst son ever and an even worse conspirator. Normal teenagers hide weed and porn magazines from their fathers, make-out sessions and girlfriends in the bathrooms, or at least a severe case of dad-I’m-in-the-closet. When Stiles decides to hide a guy in his bedroom—and there’s been one brief, uncomfortable occasion—it’s because he’s a werewolf and also the same person he’s accused of murdering Laura Hale, so that would have been hard to explain. Because when Stiles changes things up about teenage problems, he doesn’t screw around. His whole life is as freaking far away from normal as abnormal can get, which is kind of depressing.

“Anything interesting in school?” His dad makes a valiant attempt to get his son to talk. It’s a rare thing when their house isn’t filled with Stiles’s incessant rambling.

_Well, there’s a murderous werewolf on the loose, dad, and another, less murderous werewolf, whom I’m currently busy staying pissed at. Business as usual._

“No. Just. School stuff. Scott stuff. _Girl_ stuff. The usual,” Stiles squeezes the words out as if through a food processor, all chopped up.

His dad smiles. “I’m looking forward to your game tomorrow night.” And it’s a small comfort to hear him talk about normal things, reminding Stiles that there’s still an island of sanity in this world.

In his bedroom Stiles can’t fall asleep: he has long since stopped keeping regular hours, what with him keeping Scott company now and then when the moon is full, or jut prowling through the woods or elsewhere on some werewolfy business. He pretends Derek’s words do not nag on his mind, but he keeps tossing and turning and impotently fuming, thinking up several _‘Fuck off’_ responses he could have, **_should_** have snapped back at him.

When he gets out of bed, the digital clock shines 3 am at him. Stiles goes to sit by the window tiredly. It’s new moon tonight. He peers out into the darkness, pressing his forehead against the cool glass—because he might not be _able_ to go to sleep but he still _feels_ ungodly tired—and he listens to the rustling of leaves and tries to put the annoying wolf out of his head. When he sees the shape of him below his window, Stiles’s first thought is that has conjured up the sight of him in his obviously failed attempts to do the opposite.

But it’s there, a vague shadow of Derek Hale keeping watch on him tonight.

Just like that, the anger seeps out of Stiles, because it’s as much of an apology as you can get from Derek Hale, and Stiles takes it. He returns to bed, wondering what it says about the state of his life, or mind, that the sight of a werewolf in his backyard fills him with immense comfort.

 

***

 

After his mother passed away, Stiles used to spend hours lying on his parents’ bed, surrounded by the presence of her and aching because she will never be there again. It is unimaginably hard on both him and his dad, until Stiles is sent to stay with Scott for the summer, and his dad takes to sleeping on the couch, and the bedroom is completely redone in the meantime. The memory of his mom is by no means extinguished. When Stiles comes back home, her photos remain, the presence lingers in other rooms—but where it has been the strongest and most painful it is now cut out, removed like a chain that has been holding them down.

Stepping inside the burnt shell of the Hale house feels a little like stepping into Derek’s inner sanctum. Looking about Stiles thinks of all the memories of childhood trapped under the warped scarred wood of this house: of the Hale family and _their_ warmth and happiness and laughter, their dreams and hopes. No one has ever cut it out for Derek. He keeps coming back here, chaining himself down with the ache and rage of it, and Stiles wants to set him free but doesn’t know how.

These days there are more and more times he’s forced to come here alone. Scott’s still preoccupied with his epic romance, refusing to listen to Derek’s arguments, while Stiles just wants to bask in the delightful horror story that is now their life. And being privy to a secret becomes significantly less exciting when you’re not actively sharing it with someone, which is why he willingly subjects himself to the torture of Derek’s company.

It proves to be not as bad as he fears. Derek’s being a first-class **_dick_** twenty-four seven is not a _gospel_ and there are some occasional deviations from that routine: when he’s a dick, he’s still first-class about it, but it’s not necessarily twenty-four seven.

Stiles childishly wants for things to be easy. He has finally got what he wanted, but all the constant problems are ruining the dream for him. He wants for Scott to stop complaining and be with Allison, and for her parents to not hunt werewolves. For their enemies to be gone, (preferably with Jackson in tow if he’s being really picky). For him to be able to tell his dad that werewolves are real, and for his dad to accept that, and that his son is also preternatural and that’s okay. For Derek to be less of a dick, or less of a problem, or to be freaking gone already because at least half of all their troubles come from him.

“What were you even doing before you came here and ruined it all? I mean, how do werewolves like Derek Hale live their lives?”

Derek is not amused by the use of the word _‘ruined’_. “Never planned on going back here in the first place,” he says dismissively. “When I left, I was sure I would never be coming back. Wanted to build my own life, find my own terms. Travelled for a while, got an odd job here and there.”

“Really?” Stiles snorts, having trouble picturing anyone in their right minds employing Derek. “As what? A warden at a youth detention center?”

Derek glares and divulges nothing else on the topic of his jobs.

“Well, what about the werewolf stuff?” Stiles prompts. That is why he comes after all—to know about the world he has only dreamed existed and that Derek has been a part of all his life by birth. “Did you have a pack or were you just on your lonesome? Did you fight evil alphas and murderous hunters there too?”

Derek looks at him indulgently. “I knew a pack, sure. It’s dangerous to go solo in our world. They had my back. I mostly stayed clear but also had theirs if need arose. There were some hunters, sure. But that’s just a small part, Stiles. There’s more to life than the supernatural.”

 _As if,_ Stiles snorts incredulously and thinks Derek is full of shit.

 

***

 

“You could consider relaxing, you’re beginning to look like a garden fixture,” Stiles complains at Derek’s rigid form beside him.

“You could consider shutting up!” Derek growls back.

Stiles arches an eyebrow. “Well that was disappointing.”

“I rushed,” Derek concedes. He squeezes Stiles’s hand so hard he might just crush it, and Stiles bites back a groan.

Every time Derek touches him now, Stiles has to wonder what it means. Both of them are always conscious of where it is that Derek grabs him. If there’s skin contact, it’s almost certainly Stiles’s initiative: to keep a lid on Derek’s fury, to keep him inside, to keep him at bay. It is always a little terrifying, arousing in him a thrill at his own daringness.

Derek is very careful not to touch Stiles at all. Not if he can help it. Which is why every time he does, hesitant and deliberate, Stiles puzzles over why. What does he do for Derek, exactly?

Tonight, though, there is no puzzling. Tonight is a night of the full moon and Derek and Stiles find themselves trapped together by unhappy circumstance.

Stiles keeps squeezing Derek’s palm faintly, then relaxing his hold again, alternating between wanting the night to be over as quickly as possible and fearing what will come next.

Derek is sitting stiffly, poised, his muscles tense and locked like before a leap. He looks like he wants to be pacing, or maybe to be out and moon-crazy, but definitely anywhere but here. He keeps staring into the sky, to where the treacherous moon is hidden behind the clouds underwhelmingly, and he is doing his best to ignore Stiles and forget he is even there.

Stiles switches his idle prattle on like a radio. Derek may detest talking but Stiles cannot abide by the idea of them, a werewolf and his “curse-breaker”, sitting in silence for seven hours. It sounds like a set-up to an incredibly lame joke.

“Come on, you can do better than that. I know you’re just itching to give me the proper Derek Hale tongue-lashing,” Stiles nudges him with his shoulder.

Derek exhales hissingly and leans away from him, clearly of a mind that the fact they are currently touching is not reason enough to suddenly start acting chummy, and the area of their tactile contact is best kept to its bare minimum.

“What you ‘know’ and ‘think you know’ is a constant source of entertainment for me,” he grimaces.

“We can’t all have your clearly _impeccable_ judgment,” Stiles snorts.

“I haven’t yet seen any indication that you possess even a modicum of good judgment,” Derek’s tone is cutting, and Stiles finds the result immensely satisfying, which in turn makes him want to have his head checked out.

“Do I detect a thinly veiled implication that you expect to encounter good judgment in me at some point?”

Derek scoffs. “My ‘expecting’ anything is largely overshadowed by my not giving a flying fuck about what goes on in that little twerp head of yours.”

Stiles bites the inside of his cheek. Well, then. Since distracting Derek into keeping his vitriol has been his intent, it would be foolish to let it get to him now that he’s succeeding. He’s scrambling for a sufficiently unconcerned retort, annoyed that every second he’s wasting betrays the fact that Derek’s words have managed to upset him.

Derek notices his abrupt silence. “Stiles…” He starts, and pauses, and Stiles glances at him from under his brow cautiously. Derek’s face is smooth and yet filled with frustration and disorientation and, he isn’t sure, maybe gratitude and loss. “Thank you,” he says, translating the expression on his face into mundane words.

“Nevermind,” Stiles says, in a tone so airy there’s no mistaking that he appreciates the not-quite-an-apology.

Derek nods, and there’s a ghost of a smile around his eyes—the laugh lines are barely there and rusty, as if smiling is something he used to do a long time ago and has since forgot. But the unsettled expression never leaves his face.

Stiles finds himself rather off balance. He knows what Derek is worth: a guy who can destroy lives with one bitemark, who can crush Stiles’s head like a freaking melon… And then one contact with Stiles’s skin turns him into someone tragically ordinary, and dependent on someone else which is not Derek Hale’s way at all, and into someone who is so much easier to harm.

As soon as the sunlight hits the horizon, Derek takes back his hand—almost too soon, and Stiles sees the werewolf return, set around the edges of him, strength pouring into Derek’s body, as his teeth sharpen and the icy-blue assaults his eyes for a moment. He hurries because unlike his stories, Derek is not about to give anyone his leash. Because, Stiles suspects, being powerless makes him a tiny bit afraid.

The first in many ways Stiles will come to define their circumstances is this: he makes Derek vulnerable.

 

***

 

Kate Argent and her father do not adhere to the same noble code Allison’s father upholds—much as Chris Argent might like to believe something different. The bite, they deem, comes at the price of a soul. Once turned, the person is not human any more. It is a beast. And having lost its humanity, the creature should be slain.

When Allison’s mother gets bitten (in a situation too fucked up to easily point blame, because Stiles and Scott are kind of inseparable, and so Stiles is really biased to side with Derek), they mourn over her yet alive body and then put her down like a rabid dog they’re so fond of bringing up in their metaphors.

Because the full moon is about to rise and Derek has no time to reach his secure cellar Stiles ends up glued to his side yet again. He drives them slowly back to Hale’s property, Derek’s hand curled around his wrist the whole time, and Stiles knows the minute the moon begins to rise because at that moment Derek crushes his hand, and their car swings on the road for a second when Stiles lets the wheel go in surprise, earning them a honking _Fuck you!_ from a passing driver. Getting out of the car through the passenger’s sit maneuvering over the gearshift while not letting go really requires some acrobatics.

It’s not a good night to be stuck with Derek: Stiles is like a guilty anchor on a neck of a man who’d rather be alone with his demons. The urge to comfort Derek overflows him, but Stiles doesn’t think his chatter is gonna help this time. And anyway, he is more afraid that Derek will see it as pity and turn him away.

That night Derek tells him about the fire at his house. Tells him about Kate, and Stiles finally understands the heartbreaking truth of why Derek is so furious with Scott about Allison.

“You think love is this beautiful gift that will fill you with happiness. But it can be cruel and ugly. Can become dark and cause the deepest pain. How do you think Allison is gonna feel about Scott now that the werewolves took away her mother?” He keeps his eyes locked on Stiles’s, and Stiles finds it impossible to look away.

“She was killing Scott,” is all he can say, as a way of consolation that Derek hasn’t asked for.

Derek just snorts dismissively at Stiles’s sentiment, and Stiles makes an honest to god effort to put himself into Allison’s shoes. But all he keeps coming back to is that being a werewolf is not a curse, whatever Derek’s legends may call him, and it’s the Argents’ own damned fault if they want to deal with the bites like they’re a death sentence.

In a surprising revelation, however, Stiles realizes that somewhere down the line he began siding not just with the werewolves (which he obviously does, him being Scott’s better, smarter half, and all), but with Derek as well. Somehow in the place where Derek used to breed nothing but mistrust Stiles now feels loyalty to the depressing asshole, and he doesn’t know how that happened.

(Derek’s grim prognosis is dead on, too. Scott and Allison do not recover from this.)

 

***

 

To tell Derek things is not a strange compulsion—Stiles tells everyone things, sometimes deeply personal things, or useless trivia more often than not. It is a surprise to discover that Derek’s silence may not be just an icy wall of ‘I-will-emanate-so-much-annoyance-if-you-break-this-sacred-silence-that-I-find-so-relaxing-that-you’d-wish-you-kept-your-mouth-shut-and-also-feel-symptoms-of-indigestion-from-unease’. Stiles, having run into it in many people, finds that he really hates those silences.

But Derek also has an ‘I’m-a-pretty-good-listener’ type of silence and even a ‘I’m-not-judging-your-propensity-to-talk-so-much’ type of silence, which is a little impressive to Stiles who has ADHD and can’t listen to people worth a damn. And so Stiles tells him things. Sometimes deeply personal things. And useless trivia more often than not.

“How bad is it?” Stiles asks him out of the blue one time, when they are forced to sit the full moon out together once again. His voice is very low and tight. He is preparing to maybe divulge a personal thing.

“What?” Derek asks impatiently, missing the point of the question.

Stiles doesn’t look up. He can feel Derek’s stare burrowing into him but refuses to meet his eyes. He has blurt it out because it nagged at him, nagged and nagged like a bad toothache, and he’s not the kind of person to let things fester—if something is bothering him, he will damn well bring it up. His hand lies in Derek’s hand, and he thinks the implied question is really obvious.

After a while, when Derek looks away, Stiles think he will not get an answer out of him, but then Derek speaks up. His voice is surprisingly delicate when he says, “Restful.” He does something with his fingers, like a gentle squeeze but not even quite that.

Stiles looks up, surprised, and something seems burning in his chest: it is not the kind of response he was expecting.

It feels so inconvenient to him, that every time he touches Derek, he takes away his power. He must hate it, he thinks, that a _boy_ , a human whom he finds insufferable, has any such influence over him…

“You know how your body feels on adrenaline? Hot, taut, tingling. Blood straining at your skin from the inside. Like you’re running a fever. That’s like I feel most of the time.” Stiles pictures Derek’s fevered eyes and thinks, _No kidding._ “Not in any unpleasant way, but like soaking in a bath that’s a couple of degrees too hot. And then I’m suddenly plunged into an icy mountain stream. That’s how it feels.”

Stiles stares at him, taken off guard by the fact that Derek Hale is apparently not illiterate and can spin a nice metaphor after all. The metaphor also doesn’t really give him an answer.

“It’s just—” he says, a little contradictorily, “if I were in your shoes. Which I’m not. But if I were. I think I’d be pretty terrified to suddenly lose all my power, that feeling of strength in my body. Doesn’t it… I don’t know, I mean, _disturbs_ you?” He finally manages to get the words out.

Derek sighs, contemplating it, and relaxes back into the chair. The movement drags Stiles’s arm across the table with him.

“I honestly don’t know,” he says. “It’s inconvenient. But it’s not… I don’t feel _impotent_ without it.” He shrugs. “Power’s overrated anyway,” he adds bitterly.

It’s a different tune from how Derek felt even a year ago, when, confronted with his megalomaniac uncle and an equally-manic ex-girlfriend, Derek felt exactly ‘impotent’, and he covered the fact up by transforming neglected teenagers into fanged-out brats. Just another in a long lines of mistakes he’s made since returning to Beacon Hills.

“Well, you can make use of me any time,” Stiles says, and only afterwards registers how it sounds.

Derek arches an eyebrow sardonically at him but doesn’t comment.

 

***

 

“Permission to come aboard?” Stiles asks good-humoredly.

Derek stares at him squirming on his doorstep for a good long minute before rolling his eyes and making an aggravated ‘hmph-meh’ sound, which Stiles interprets as something close to _You’re welcome to come in._

“What are you doing here, Stiles?” Derek asks, and his tone is affected, making Stiles supremely uncomfortable in the knowledge that maybe he’s reading Derek all wrong, and the faint growl was actually meant to relay, _Why do you keep bothering me, you skinny moron?_

“Came to do research,” he says, laying on his enthusiasm thickly. He opens his bag, demonstrating print outs, a variety of books and a laptop. “Four eyes are better than two.”

“And it couldn’t wait till another night?”

“Why waste a perfectly good full moon?” Stiles gives him a tight smile. He isn’t told to leave.

Because Derek decides to be an asshole they sit in crushing silence, interrupted occasionally by rustling leaves. Because he’s Stiles for whom any kind of silence is unendurable, he reaches into his back for a crunchy pack of chips and makes a point of rustling it as loudly as he can.

Derek glares at him with his _You gotta be fucking kidding me_ stare. Stiles pretends to be nonplussed and offers him the pack. He half expects Derek to impale it on his claws and snatch it away furiously. After a pregnant pause, Derek grunts and lowers his paw into the pack, fishing for a fistful of chips.

As the undulated golden disks disappear into his mouth with undignified crunching, Stiles notes with a level of surprise that spending the night in a half-burnt husk of a house where the floor is rid with claw marks becomes startlingly mundane, when the supernatural killer you’re biding your time with is munching on _Lay’s_ and letting crumbles fall to the floor.

 

***

 

“You are on the wrong side of things, Stiles,” Gerard tells him.

They are sitting opposite each other at a table in an empty house that belongs to neither, but the elder Argent manages to appear quite at home here, while Stiles feels like an intruder.

“Oh? That should be rich,” Stiles mutters, bracing himself for his monologue. He says it under his breath, but Gerard seems to have werewolf’s hearing. His expression hardens and his eyes are locked on Stiles, seemingly unblinking. Stiles has a passing thought that the man might be in control of the Kanima, but if anything, he’s the real snake here.

“When werewolves hid in the night and hunted humankind,” he says, quite out of nowhere, “it was your ancestors who hunted _them_. You were the boogieman. The scourge of these rabid animals.”

Stiles blinks, unprepared for the vague venture in legends. He has been expecting some kind of a ‘bad cop’ routine. “Aren’t you gonna threaten my life in vague metaphors, or something?”

The man sneers, the sight of it sending chills down his spine. “If you were an ordinary human, Stiles, I would have simply advised you to remove yourself from the conflict that doesn’t concern you.”

“Advised?” Stiles echoes dryly.

“With incentive,” Gerard admits.

Stiles gives him a wry, unamused smile: a vague metaphor, right there. “I’m sensing a ‘but’?”

“As it happens,” Gerard continues, “you are not an _ordinary_ human. And your part in this conflict is as ancient and as well-deserved as ours. Even if your—” he pauses and seems to consider Stiles’s appearance thoughtfully, and with visible distaste. “Upbringing,” he decides on the word eventually, “is sorely lacking.”

Stiles bristles, his chest swelling with the righteous anger on behalf of his father. If this is a bribe tactic—and Stiles is fairly certain that it is—than Gerard is a really poor judge of character.

“You think I should be helping _you_?” he asks incredulously.

“As is the tradition of the soulless,” Gerard replies, and Stiles purses his lips: he really doesn’t like anyone but himself using that word.

“And, let me guess, if I refuse, you’ll advise me to reconsider. With incentive.”

“As I said,” Gerard replies, standing up. “Your upbringing has been lacking for you to understand the whole scale of this war. I have hinted briefly on the history you are now a part of. Should you be resistant, I am sure we could further… _educate_ you. It will be most stimulating.”

Stiles keeps his face admirably straight. “Oh no, perish the thought. God save me from history lessons.”

Gerard smirks, but they both know they have understood each other with perfect clarity. The man heads for the door, letting Stiles stay in the emptiness of the house to ponder on things, but pauses before exiting.

“You fear Derek Hale,” he says. “Consider this: _he_ should be afraid of you.”

Stiles snorts and is reminded of the beginning of his acquaintance with Derek, when he silently, sullenly bore all the ‘charm’ of his personality. Back then Stiles did wish that Derek should find out what he is and fear it.

That didn’t happen, of course, and Stiles isn’t sure if anything changed even following the revelation. The shift between them is rather imperceptible, but where they grated at each other once, they are now settled in places that fit together—like two components that were at first pieced together wrong, gears grinding and wearing at each other, and then fell into place and it was all smooth from here on out.

Stiles hardly thinks it has anything to do with Derek knowing that he’s soulless: rather, the expanse of them knowing each other grew bit by bit until their familiarity became spacious enough to allow for more patience and understanding, and a room to breathe. So no, Stiles doesn’t fear Derek Hale, not any longer.

What he fears is that he has always been prepared that someone might want to harm him for what he is, or whose company he keeps. He has never considered that someone might wish to exploit what he can do. And the prospect of being used against his friends—that is what’s truly frightful.

 

***

 

Stiles makes his allegiances firmly known. Gerard keeps his word and sends his hunters for the purpose of reeducating him.

The skirmish comes to involve the whole pack, and after the fact, Stiles is having trouble hauling himself into his own bedroom. He’s glad his father is pulling an all-nighter at the sheriff’s station because no way he wants to explain his sorry state to him. He isn’t sure he would know a good excuse.

Through the window of his bedroom he sees a shadow stalking his backyard. It’s Derek, which makes Stiles oddly pleased that he was concerned enough not to send one of his pups to keep an eye out on Stiles’s house but came himself. He’s not on paws but on two legs, which is how Stiles is able to recognize him, and after a while it occurs to him that maybe Derek’s fishing for an invitation.

Stiles thinks about the ancient Internet joke, the one about saying ‘I know you’re listening,’ to an empty room in case someone really is. He feels like a total idiot, standing in the middle of his bedroom and declaring loudly, “I’m glad you’re keeping an eye out. You can come up if you need anything.”

Because, weird as it might be, but fact is, Derek’s hearing is this good. Good enough that you can talk to yourself in the vacuum of your room and really be talking to him.

It takes half an hour for Derek to accept the invitation. He’s not very gracious about it and lies that he needs to take a leak. Stiles takes one looks at his battered, bloody clothes, and infers that Derek came here straight away. Stiles chalks it up to Derek’s utter inability to prioritize, and says, “You can use the freaking shower.”

By now, Stiles actually has one spare pair of Derek’s clothes in his closet: the ones he left when promptly leaving Stiles’s house on four legs two weeks ago. Stiles wonders if maybe he should stock up: Derek keeps showing up bloodied and they have waited out at least two full moons here, so it’s only prudent.

They stay up for half the night, watching a marathon of _MacGyver_. Stiles is ungodly tired and doesn’t particularly pay attention, but he also hurts all over and cannot fall asleep.

He keeps staring down at their hands, lying inches apart on the sofa, almost touching. Derek’s hand is strong and broad, different from Stiles’s slim and pale one, but also male, and similar. Maybe it’s the insane exhaustion in his brain, but tonight Stiles burns with the awareness that he actually wants to. Touch his hand, that is. Take it into his own and feel the familiar warmth and weight of it.

He keeps looking for an excuse to cover Derek’s palm with his, his fingers clenching and unclenching absently. But it’s not the full moon tonight, and he doesn’t find any. He drifts asleep, something in his chest feeling curiously unfulfilled.

 

***

 

Because they expect Gerard to make another move on Stiles the night of the full moon when the werewolves aren’t there to protect him, Derek once again remains on two legs with him. They bank on Gerard seeing the gift of the soulless as nothing more than a weapon. There’s no scenario he can possibly conceive in his head that involves Stiles working _with_ the werewolves, or rather the wolves working with him.

Derek spends the whole night on edge, and Stiles indulges him, allowing himself to be dragged around his house, because Derek vents by way of pacing. They argue around Stiles’s kitchen, trying to make coffee with only Stiles’s left hand, and only Derek’s right hand, and everyone’s in everyone’s way, they’re bumping into each other or tugging into opposite directions. Stiles finds himself on the verge of laughing several times, except Derek’s scowl tonight is most impressive and doesn’t invite a lot of joking, and Stiles wishes he would just loosen up.

Come morning, he expect Derek to bolt like hell’s chasing him, but he doesn’t. He lingers on his porch instead, and Stiles thinks how weird it is to be seeing Derek off after a night of… well, something, and what is he waiting for anyway?

“You should stop,” Derek says out of nowhere. “This isn’t your fight. You should walk away, keep yourself from getting hurt all the time. You’re not made to deal with _this_.”

He looks up at Stiles, and his face shifts around the edges, showing glimpses of the animal within: his brow ridge thickens, his canines show, and his eyes that once flashed icy-blue now glint with red. It is bizarre and a little terrifying, but Stiles, although given some pause by the performance, is not easily side-tracked.

“I beg to differ,” he says. “There’s no person better equipped to deal with this.” He raises his hand and almost touches Derek’s face but thinks better of it. (He likes having his hand attached to his body.) His palm lands on Derek’s neck instead.

The werewolf looks insulted that Stiles has intervened with him making a Very Important Point, but Stiles decides it’s no worse an intrusion than Derek manhandling him constantly and pushing him around. Karma’s a bitch and all that.

Derek twists his head away uncomfortably, and Stiles amenably lets his hand drop, pulling his finger into a fist awkwardly. “I was under the impression I was free to make my own choices,” he says.

“Were you also under the impression I’d let you act on them?” Derek asks dryly. “You must have a happily selective memory.”

Stiles scoffs. “You’re crazy if you think anything you do will somehow keep me away. I’m very resourceful as I’m sure you’ve noticed, loathe that you may be to admit it.”

“I did notice.” To admit it, to Stiles’s honest surprise, took almost no hesitation at all.

“Well… there you go.”

“Don’t you have any self-preservation?” Derek sounds almost accusing.

“I have a stronger sense of my-friends-preservation. Which is why, um, _no_. Whatever you say, whatever argument you have, just, no. I’m not going anywhere.”

 

***

 

Stiles is learning many things he wouldn’t have if he was a normal person. Like, the difference between the pain of being stabbed and the pain of having been stabbed. The former is a sharp exploding sensation that feels like the worst in the world: the hurt of your body being torn open that is unlike the pain of an acute internal cramp or even of being smashed in the face repeatedly. It is the moment when you realize for the first time what sharp really feels like, and then you open up in a way flesh shouldn’t.

The latter feeling is there to prove that are still worse pains there. Being stabbed is a whip of a lash: excruciating, but quick. Having been stabbed is exhaustion. Stiles feels like he’s _leaking_ : and he doesn’t mean just blood. He’s leaking whatever feeling is the opposite of apathy; it’s probably his will to live. Blood loss makes him light-headed and melancholy. When the hunters find him, he doesn’t even care.

“You’re probably wondering what you did to deserve this,” one of them says. “You probably don’t even realize who your friends are.”

Stiles thinks that someone’s a small fry and is being kept out of the loop. And that being counted out, presumed not dangerous and not important is _really_ getting old. He’s too tired to say anything snappy on the subject.

“Don’t worry. We’ll make a quick work of it,” the other one says. “You must be in pain. It will be a mercy.”

Stiles considers calling for help but all he can do is pant. He is sprawled on the floor of a motel where he’s been taken to, resting against the bed. Blood pools around him, much darker than he has expected it to be, soaks into the carpet, and Stiles thinks that the dry-cleaning bill’s gonna be a bitch.

There is a crash of a broken down door, followed by and awful thud of a fur-covered mass slamming into a man. Someone is thrown across the room. Other hunters lunge for their guns and knives. It is too late for their companion as Derek sinks his teeth into the man’s forearm. “No!” the poor bastard cries out and wails helplessly, the repeat of his _no_ s the only accompanying sound to the almost silent fight. It is not the kill that they fear but the bite.

Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. And don’t bring it to a werewolf fight, Stiles muses to himself, a little hysterical. Derek is too fast for them, knocking down the knife-wielder to the ground and clawing him, then sinking his teeth into the gun-carrying arm of the last one. Bullets that aren’t Argent magical evil bullets are only a small hindrance to him.

The men run off, and Derek doesn’t chase them. He stalks to the bed, claws clattering against the wooden floorboards, and with a low grunt that turns from animal to clearly human he shifts by the bed. Stiles is too tired to even turn his head and watch him. Out of the corner of his eyes he sees him tugging the sheets off the bed and draping around himself.

When Derek reappears in his view, Stiles can’t help but smile because he looks ridiculous mantled like that. Then Derek looks at him, chest heaving (and there are battle marks all over it, healing before Stiles’s very eyes), and there’s such fire in his stare that Stiles leans back into the bed almost involuntarily.

Derek doesn’t seem to notice that as he kneels down in front of Stiles, inspecting him with a closed-off expression. “I called Deaton,” he says. “He said not to call an ambulance: he’ll come and fix you up. Scott’s driving him right now.”

Stiles thinks of Deaton, whose life is still shrouded with mystery to them but who acts infuriatingly blasé about anything thrown his way. He wants to make a stupid joke about how they should make a movie about it and call it, _Dr. Deaton, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Werewolves._ Maybe a sitcom. Or maybe that should be the title of his own biography.

“Ugh…” is really all the sound Stiles musters up. He stares at Derek, and thinks that the amount of time he has seen him in various degrees of clotheless is getting ridiculous. It brings a semi-hysterical smile to his lips. Derek’s lips are, on the other hand, smudged—a fact Stiles informs him of.

“You’ve got blood all over your face,” he states, making a clawing motion with his hand, like he wants to gather it all up. His voice is quieter than he appreciates.

Derek reels back, his eyes startled and cold, and he doesn’t seem all that appreciative of the helpful beauty tip, even as he raises his hand to wipe the red away. It doesn’t really help. But something about Derek shutters down uninvitingly. Stiles has a fleeting thought that Derek might be upset, but before he can investigate it, the thought is gone, lost in the foggy maze of his blood-losing mind.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t see much of Derek over the summer.

It’s him and Scott all on their own, like it has always been, like it will always be, and if Scott misses Allison (something Stiles is very aware that he does), or if Stiles misses Derek (something Scott has no clue about), they don’t talk about it.

On one full moon in late August Derek just appears on Stiles’s doorstep and says he has need of him. Stiles flails, because who just shows up and demands stuff like that? Derek Hale does, naturally.

“Should I even ask what this is about?” he says, stuffing his bag in preparation of nightly shenanigans.

“The less you know the better,” Derek replies sinisterly, because being straight with Stiles will of course kill him. Stiles gives him a long-suffering sigh and takes his hand.

After almost two months of silence Stiles would have thought they’d be rusty, awkwardness all over again. But they fall into the old pattern easily enough. It is a little like they are an extension of one other, each giving up an arm, but Derek becomes Stiles’s right hand, and Stiles becomes Derek’s left hand, and they just intuit each other’s movements and intentions from the shifts in their conjoined wrists-elbows-shoulders.

Stiles has thought before that he simply missed Derek’s ‘charming’ company. He realizes, squeezing Derek’s hand, that he was missing this.

Derek drives him around the Beacon Hills erratically. They go to investigate an abandoned block of storage units, then a shed in the woods, then an apartment building on the edge of town. If there are some clues there for Derek, Stiles doesn’t see them and Derek feels disinclined to share. Why this all had to be done on a full moon is likewise a mystery.

The only thing Stiles discovers for himself is that two months of no nightly outings have stabilized his internal clock somewhat, and by two in the morning he’s dead on his feet and feels a little less like Derek’s helpful limb and a little more like a rented utensil he couldn’t get by without.

Somewhere on the drive over from the apartment building Stiles falls asleep.

“Stiles.”

He starts, and sits up. There’s a crick in his neck that makes itself immediately known, and Stiles grunts, kneading it.

“We’re here,” Derek says.

Stiles turns his head and finds that ‘here’ is back at Derek’s place.

“Why are we here and not at my place?” he asks after some consideration. His voice is sleep-rough and he clears his throat.

“Your father’s home, isn’t he?” Derek lifts their clasped hands up to his eye level. “That would have been hard to explain.”

“Right. Sleepy brain. Sorry,” Stiles sighs and runs his hand down his face. “I don’t suppose I can sleep at your place? I’m literally _dying_ here.”

Derek’s face becomes inscrutable. “There’s a bed,” he confirms slowly.

“I figured,” Stiles rolls his eyes. “Can I crash there?”

Derek opens and closes his mouth several times, struggling for words. The prospect doesn’t particularly inspire him, it seems, but Stiles doesn’t lose hope. “Are you absolutely sure?” he asks finally.

“I’m gonna fall asleep five minutes ago. What’s to be sure about?”

“I mean, are you sure you’re gonna be comfortable… with…” Derek cuts himself off and frowns.

“Derek, I’m pretty sure at this point I’m gonna be comfortable falling asleep _standing_.”

“That’s not what I—” Derek starts, then looks at Stiles and sighs. “Yes, Stiles. You can sleep.” He drags him out of the car and leads him inside.

“Thank you!” Stiles rushes out with a relieved exhale that makes Derek snort a little. “Just, you, wake me up at dawn, okay? I think I would like to see it. And then actually sleep in my bed.”

“Sure, Stiles,” Derek says, while Stiles is already dropping heavily onto the bed. Derek moves a chair close to it and sits down. “You can sleep,” he says again, and his tone seems affected, but Stiles is in no condition to puzzle him out. His head hits the pillow, and he sleeps.

He rouses with a shock to a hand gently shaking him awake. “Whaa—?” Stiles mumbles sluggishly and turns to where he thinks Derek is, blinking him into focus. Derek doesn’t appear to have moved an inch.

“It’s almost time,” he says. Stiles shakes his head, still feeling logy, and tries to rub the sleep out of his face. He doesn’t feel particularly rested, but he is functional, and to meet the sun has been his addle-brained idea anyway.

“You really should know better than to listen to me when I’m half-asleep,” he says, when they’re outside. The lukewarm August morning makes Stiles shiver pleasantly.

“This did seem a bit whimsical, yes,” Derek concedes. “I was too preoccupied with you appropriating my bed.”

“Yeah. Sorry. You must have been half-asleep as well.”

Derek shrugs. “That’s not it,” he says quietly. “Awfully trusting of you, that’s all.”

Stiles blinks and considers it. And considers it some more. _That’s all,_ indeed. He’s painfully aware of his hand in Derek’s palm growing unattractively clammy. Because, excuse you, when did _that_ happen? How has he missed it?

If Derek had let go for even a second, be it from falling asleep as well or some malicious intent, he would have turned, and Stiles would be dead. And ‘normal Stiles’ would have never suggested anything like this: they work _together_ , that’s the whole point. ‘Sleepy Stiles’, apparently, had no problems with trusting Derek to stay awake and do nothing that would hurt him.

Stiles feels like he has woken not just from a few hours of sleep but a haze, and things are brought into abrupt sharp focus.

“I still can’t seem to convince you I have any good judgment,” he says, and is pleased that his voice sounds normal.

Derek smiles at him. Like an idiot, Stiles stares.

He has never actively thought of Derek as pretty. Having some smoldering qualities, sure. His face is as handsome as it is terrifying, and besides, the overall crassness of behavior goes far to ruin one’s impression of another’s looks.

His smile reshapes his whole face, though, makes him into someone different. Someone who could have fallen in stupid love with Kate Argent, someone alarmingly more sentimental. Stiles wonders how many people he has opened up to enough to show them that smile.

The sky begins to pink, and Stiles is suddenly overcome with terror of having to let go of Derek’s hand. Surreptitiously, he scoots closer and rests his temple against Derek’s shoulder. Maybe he thinks that Stiles is still dozing, but Derek doesn’t say a word. He squeezes Stiles’s palm lightly.

If Stiles could boil his life down to one moment, it would be this: his hand in Derek’s hand, radiating warmth as they sit together—on the edge of the forest, in Stiles’s living room, on the terrace of Derek’s house, **_wherever_** —and wait for the morning to come.

“Here it comes,” Derek announces finally, and Stiles cannot fault him for sounding keen. The horizon reveals the sun, and it is like Derek’s face begins to glow as well.

Stiles gulps heavily, feeling Derek’s hand slipping out of his, and doesn’t tear his eyes away from sky, watching the golden disk rise above the roofs of the town. His vision blurs, but he stubbornly keeps his eyes open, secure in the knowledge that they feel wet from the unexpected sharpness of sunlight and not from the sudden feeling of abandonment. He curls his empty fingers into a fist, still feeling the taunting ghost of Derek’s palm in his.

The sun is up.

 

***

 

After getting shiv’d by the hunters in spring, Stiles is even more anxious to insert himself into every order of business. Scott plays the mommy and insists on getting him home, and Derek gets this pinched look of an impending aneurism burst every time Stiles as much as goes near his place, which is why Stiles pretends to be mollified by Scott’s efforts and drives himself back home, where he is getting his well-deserved rest.

Which is why to see none of Derek during the summer doesn’t seem all that suspect: even Stiles’s perpetual anxiety has to give up when his body needs to repair a four-inch gash in its stomach, and Derek knows it, and is maybe even concerned, wearing it the I’m-scowling-more-than-usual style, which Stiles may consider endearing in a roundabout _Derek Hale_ sort of way.

Anyway, if Derek dragged him out for anything as early as June, Stiles would have just ripped his stitches and bled out, and with his luck Deaton would have refused to help him for the second time, because that’s exactly what he has threatened to do if Stiles didn’t keep to a bed regimen, and that would have been a bummer.

But then Derek crashes his little holiday in August, and actually crashes his whole fucking existence, and Stiles is going a little insane obsessing over every little detail of all their nights together, picking it apart in his head like a crazy person. So when Scott lets it drop that Derek seems to be investigating something, and is gathering the pack, and has even invited Scott, and there were no threats involved to impress on him that he really _needs_ to be there, but only grown-up words, Stiles decides he has rested enough.

He and Scott drive out to Derek’s together, and Stiles tries to ignore the heebie-jeebies bouncing in his freshly healed stomach, throwing Stiles between wanting to vomit and to laugh. He thinks of the way Derek looks when smiling, and frets.

Derek doesn’t smile when he sees him come in. In fact, he behaves like kind of an asshole, drop the ‘kind of’, ‘cause that’s just who he is.

“I don’t remember inviting you here,” he tells Stiles unkindly.

“All healed,” Stiles ignores his tone and beams smugly at him, considering pushing his shirt up to demonstrate the pink scar. “So, I don’t know what supernatural undertaking you all have been up to lately, but I’m not missing another second.”

Derek scowls at him. “You should go home, Stiles. We’ve got this.”

“Thank you, I’ll make myself right at home.” The pack is gathered around the table, and Stiles walks right up there. Boyd gets out of his way like Stiles is some kind of a leper, and Stiles tries to not let it get to him that they’re all rubbing shoulders but part before him like the freaking Red Sea. “Lay it on me,” he says.

It doesn’t get any better though. Derek explains the plan: more for Scott’s benefit than for Stiles’s, because Scott does actually figure into Derek’s chessboard. And then, ‘I could be on the west border,’ except ‘Boyd’s on that,’ and ‘So, I could keep an eye out on things by the sawmill,’ but ‘That’s Isaac’s job, and he’ll be one four legs, so you are definitely not there on any kind of legs,” and so on and so forth, and this is the most obscure and painfully drawn-out _Fuck off_ Stiles has ever heard in his life.

“Right. Well. Clearly, no one’s been expecting the Preternatural Inquisition. But do keep in mind next time that we _are_ on call, our services have resumed.” Erica gives him half a reassuring smile in response to his measly joke, and Stiles can’t shake the mortifying feeling of being the humiliating cocktail of needy and needless.

“That won’t be necessary,” Derek says, and in case Stiles is really dense, he adds, “ _You_ won’t be necessary.”

Stiles, being a person of wayward moods, goes immediately from being mortified to being extremely irritated. Derek scowls back at him, and at any other moment, given that he has now seen him smiling and what it does to his face, Stiles would have found ‘scowling Derek’ adorable, especially because his scowling has long since stopped having the desired intimidating affect. Not so much at this point, though.

“I seem to be missing something here. When you dragged me across the town a week ago without explaining anything, like I’m your fucking pageboy, you were acting pretty civil towards me. Not to insult your brooding image, but you were actually ‘nice’ to me, letting me sleep in your bed and all that.”

Scott’s face becomes something indescribable. Derek closes his eyes in a show of pure ‘god-grant-me-the-patience’ martyrdom.

“Shut up, you all,” Stiles rolls his eyes, even though no one said anything. “Poor choice of words about the bed there, and anyway. What I’m trying to say is, here I am, prepared to lend a hand, metaphorically and quite literally, and I must have missed some imaginary fault on my part that you’re suddenly being a passive-aggressive dickhead, like what’s with that, who took a shit into your breakfast this morning?”

In spite of some spunky choice of words there Derek’s scowl lessens, then softens into a tired expression. “I’m not trying to pick a fight with you, Stiles. I’m just sending you home.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a punishment.”

“Okay. So why? ‘Cause if it’s the whole _‘you’ll be safer there’_ deal again—”

“I don’t need you.” Derek says it very calmly, and quite aloof in the sentiment.

Stiles’s mouth goes dry. He isn’t sure what he has been expecting, exactly, but the words come like a freaking hoof to the chest. And by virtue of certain horse-riding supernaturals who are unhealthily fond of beheading games Stiles does know the feeling pretty accurately.

“And you will be safer there,” Derek adds, though it doesn’t lessen the blow.

“Fine,” he insists, “but **_I_** need to be here. You can’t just shut me out of things! I’m part of this.”

“I’m not trying to keep secrets from you,” Derek shrugs, like he couldn’t care less. “Keep in the loop if you want. But here you’ll just be in our way.”

Stiles can actually see in his face that there’s no changing Derek’ mind, but he has never taken things silently and lying down, so he starts speaking anyway. “Derek, this is freaking ridiculous, what are you ever talking about, you can’t just give a guy a leave of absence, and then he returns to find that his job position has been fucking _abrogated_ while he was gone, I’m pretty sure there are **_laws_** —”

“Stiles,” Derek cuts him off, and Stiles shuts up. “Just go home.” It is almost an order.

Stiles looks around himself, at the pack that has formed around Derek in spite of his best efforts to botch it at every turn: three high school seniors that were all prime choices for disaster, Scott who by virtue of his compassion and endless patience figured out that Derek is a decent werewolf being beneath all the layers of fucked-up, and Jackson who is naturally in a league-of-his-own-and-that’s- _not_ -a-compliment.

Before Derek picked up other delinquents, Stiles is a part of this because Scott becomes a part of this. Then he’s just used to (and glad to be) coming when called, which is frequent. Then, when his anxieties finally catch up with the new world order enough for him to start nitpicking every situation, he starts having freak-outs. Freak-outs about not being a werewolf, about getting in their way, about being this, really, hydrogen fucking **_bomb_** in a cluster of werewolves who could ruin everything by a single fucking touch, and isn’t that just a nice lil’ non-panic-inducing thought for someone like Stiles to ponder on.

And here he is, and it’s like the proverbial _shit-I’m-fucking-naked_ nightmare, only worse, having it all blow up in his face like he knew, he freaking **_knew_** it would: a pack of werewolves, and everyone has his assigned place, and Stiles is the odd preternatural out, and Scott looks guilty as hell but it is what it is, and Derek is scowling him out the door.

To say ‘Fuck you,’ would be petty and childish.

“Fuck you, then,” he says all the same, and his voice sounds unrecognizable to his own ears.

At home he fumes, and wants to do something stupid and age-appropriate, like maybe get drunk on his father’s whiskey, but he’s never been prone to such antics, especially since alcohol and Adderall are potentially suicidal concoction. He drinks a can of beer, which is, like, not even noticeable, and follows it by a can of Red Bull, then immediately has to take a leak, and he just _wanders_. Around his own house. Like a freaking idiot.

He paces his room. Wanders into the kitchen to raid the fridge, then immediately remembers bumping elbows with Derek here while trying to make coffee, and gets pissed at Derek for it. He turns the TV on, and doesn’t even compute what’s on while mindlessly flipping channels, and all this stuff’s rubbish anyway. He paces his room some more, and finds himself, stupidly, drawn to the window, peering out of it hopefully.

The crescent is thin tonight, illuminating nothing, and Stiles curses the darkness, because he thinks he spots a shaggy silhouette every two minutes. Hoping that Derek would feel guilty, and come after him, and tell him that he didn’t mean it, and of course they need Stiles. Like the man even _can_ feel guilt. Like Stiles doesn’t know in his heart of hearts that he’s completely useless.

In his head he’s been tossing all possible reasons for being kicked out, every painfully preserved embarrassment and failure. What he keeps coming back to, after all this time, is a single moment in Deaton’s clinic where Derek learns what Stiles can do, and then, _‘Your kind has almost been the end of mine.’_ Maybe Derek has finally figured that Stiles, with his uncontrollable power to reduce Derek to bland disgusting humanity by a mere touch, is more trouble than he’s worth.

Feeling suddenly defeated by this thought, Stiles tiredly slumps down onto the bed, not bothering to flick off the lights of his bedside lamp. He kicks off his snickers, drags his feet up and falls back. He wants to close his eyes and sleep without dreams.

The street under his windows is soul-crushingly empty.

 

***

 

Once upon a time, a boy dreamt of a different life, of being special. And the world was simple, full of games and fun.

Once upon a time, being special was nothing more than a childhood fancy. Once upon a time, life like everyone else’s would have been enough. The boy would have gone on to have a crush on Lydia Martin, pretending it is something other than childish. Gone on to college. Acquired an idea of what to do in life. Made choices that would have filled him with a sense of contentment, erasing the yearnings of the childhood entirely.

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as werewolves, and curses, and magic.

All that’s changed now, and Stiles’s life has gone down the ‘less travelled road’. It is securely supernatural-infested, and how can it be any other way? All of what he has dreamed of came true. None of it in the shape that he wanted. But how can anyone expect him to ever give that up?

 

***

 

In the company of wolves Stiles is poignantly aware of how useless, and pretty much a hindrance he is, there’s really no need to justify kicking him out of the pack by real life examples. But Derek decides to really drive the point home and gets his ass mauled by a wendigo. Stiles has a whole speech prepared about idiot kamikaze antics and whatnot, but to hear it Derek first needs to wake the hell up.

Stiles is frozen to one spot on the floor, swaying helplessly, and he watches Derek arch on the bed, whimpering, half-delirious with heat and fever. His eyes open but do not recognize anyone. He grabs at Erica’s wrist as she stands up and begs for water and to make it stop. Erica’s hands are full of bandages, and they are stained with blood.

Stiles wants to dash to him, pushing Erica aside and tripping over himself in his usual humiliating manner and not fucking caring about that. Wants to hold Derek’s head up and help him drink, to be there for him, wants to pull up the same chair that Derek sat in while Stiles lay asleep in this very bed, and to fucking hold Derek’s hand throughout all of this, is this so fucking much to ask?

His right arm hangs listlessly along his body, and he squeezes his hand into a fist painfully tight to stop it from shaking. It’s his ‘Derek hand’, the one he gives up when being tied to Derek almost always: logistic of moving aside, when they eventually end up sitting up, it is always Stiles’s right hand in Derek’s left.

“What can I do?” he asks hoarsely, unclenching his fist eventually. He watches Erica put a glass of water to Derek’s lips, her hand on the back of Derek’s head where Stiles’s hand is supposed to be.

“Nothing,” she says. “Derek needs to heal, and he needs to be a werewolf for that, so you can’t do—” she waves her hand vaguely and doesn’t say ‘touch him’. “Anything, you can’t do anything. Just stay back.” It is clear from her face that she doesn’t understand why Scott even brought Stiles here, since he is completely ineffective. But Scott understands more about the emotional mess of whatever-the-hell-it-is-animosity-friendship between Stiles and Derek than Stiles gives him credit for. They are still best friends, and Scott does have eyes.

“The wendigo is still out there,” Scott says. “It has taken out our Alpha, and it knows that, it isn’t gonna just kick back and watch us trying to regroup. It’ll lick its wounds and strike again, and we need to be out there, all of us. Stiles can watch Derek.”

“Stiles is the least suitable person to stay with Derek,” Erica says.

“Can you come up with a scenario where his ability will help us tonight?” Scott points out, and she can’t. “I didn’t think so.” He manages to say it in an entirely inoffensive tone of voice, a warm rebuke where Derek’s tone saying the same thing would have been the height of vitriolic. Stiles’s chest aches, because he misses vitriolic.

Scott rummages through a dresser and produces leather gloves. “There. Satisfied?” Scott tells Erica, who grudgingly nods. Scott tosses the gloves to Stiles. “He stays. We go. **_Now_**. I need all of the pack with me on this one.”

Stiles doesn’t miss the ‘I’ in that sentence and shoots his friend a curious look: he thought that there was no ‘I’ in a pack except for the Alpha. But no one questions Scott’s being all beta-in-command, and the pack gathers with proficiency. Stiles finds himself alone with Derek in no time, the only sound in the house being Derek’s pained shallow breathing and Stiles’s rapid heartbeat.

He goes to the kitchen, pours cold water into a bowl, grabs a clean piece of cloth and returns to Derek. Gingerly, careful not to allow for any contact, Stiles brings the wet cloth to Derek’s forehead, wiping the sweat away. Even through the fabric he can feel Derek’s skin burning, and continues dabbing at it, hoping that the water will cool his heat down somewhat.

He wants very badly to run his fingers over Derek’s face, brush the wet hair away from his forehead, the same way his mother used to do when Stiles was sick as a child. Except instead Stiles remembers how she used to come up to his dad from behind, dragging her fingers through his short hair and kissing the top of his head—a memory Stiles has imprinted into his mind, stored away with the images of ‘love’ and ‘family’.

He wants to kiss the top of Derek’s head like that, and when did that happen exactly? He is resigned to steal brief touches through a wet cloth instead.

He works on Derek’s face until the bowl is empty of water. It might have taken an hour or two, not that Stiles has noticed. Derek’s fever seems to have died down, although that’s hardly Stiles’s accomplishment.

Setting the bowl aside, Stiles puts the gloves on, takes Derek’s hand into his, and settles back in his chair, watching his features, then just dozing lightly, prepared to be awakened by the smallest stir. He isn’t sure if his eyes stay closed for five minutes or fifty-five, but he startles when Derek groans softly, and his fingers tighten around Stiles’s palm.

Stiles straightens rigidly, completely awake, and waits, tightening his fingers in response strongly, desperately. Derek opens his eyes and looks at him, and he is completely lucid.

“Stiles,” he says, and closes his eyes again. The corners of his mouth curl up a little. It’s not a real smile, not like the one Stiles has seen before, but it fills him with enough ease and air to drop his head on Derek’s chest and breath him in, blissfully relieved.

Derek drapes his heavy arm around his shoulder languidly, and Stiles startles, remembering that Derek is supposed to be healing. He straightens up immediately, but squeezes Derek’s hand in reassurance. Derek squeezes back and then frowns, confused, opening his eyes to look down at their hands. His eyebrows rise questioningly.

“You shouldn’t touch me,” Stiles tells him.

Something closes off in Derek’s face and he promptly lets his hand slide out of Stiles’s. Even with the glove on Stiles feels the emptiness of his grasp acutely.

“No. I mean. My skin. I mean, you need to heal. So.” He isn’t sure if that may actually constitute a sentence, and frowns.

Derek nods, relaxing slightly, but his face remains carefully blank. “Of course. Smart.”

He doesn’t move his hand, and after a moment’s debate Stiles picks it up himself, folding his palm between his two gloved hands. Derek allows it to rest there for a few seconds, then takes it back again.

“It’s weird this way,” he says, and it seems to Stiles like his mouth is still numb. He reaches for a glass of water Erica has left and offers it to Derek. He thinks about holding his head up but Derek doesn’t need him. He uses one elbow to prop himself up and drinks, then sets the glass by the bed again and slumps back tiredly. “When I don’t feel your skin,” he continues. “It’s weird. Impersonal.” He shrugs a little, appearing somewhat contrite.

Stiles groans, because this is so very stupid, he should be able to just touch whomever he wants. And he very much _wants_ to. He drops his head into his hands and the feeling of the gloves against his face instantly annoys him.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters into the ladle of his hands, and he is.

“It’s not your fault,” Derek says evenly. “It’s who you are.”

 _Wish that I weren’t,_ Stiles wants to say, but what would that accomplish?

He can barely stand it, the overwhelming worthlessness that has forced its way into the center of his body in punishing nudges. The weight of it makes him want to weep. He aches to make Derek whole.

If there were a way for him to tear out his ability just for the comfort of a single touch, he would not hesitate to do it. He would drain all his life and all his energy if he could put it into Derek and make him better—he’s got enough to spare.

Stiles looks down at Derek, his muscles limp once again, as he is back asleep, but dreaming calmer and healthier now. His arm lies invitingly on top of the covers, but because Derek has found it weird Stiles doesn’t touch him. He pulls the gloves off angrily and sits back.

In this horrible, _hollow_ moment of knowing how utterly, utterly useless he is, Stiles also knows something else. He’s in love with Derek Hale.

 

***

 

When Stiles is very small (long before he pretends to be a smart-ass), his mother reads him to sleep, and Stiles lies awake in the night and imagines himself someone special.

When Stiles is relatively small (a short while before he becomes a regular smart-ass), he fears the boring confinements of an adult life and wants to be someone different.

He is no longer small. And he _has_ grown up to be an obnoxious smart-ass. At night he lies awake, staring into the ceiling, something clenching tight in his chest, and wishes despairingly to be someone ordinary.

 

***

 

Stiles cracks open an eyelid, or tries to. His eye doesn’t seem to want to open much. The light in the room is very bright, and Stiles obediently lets his eye close, deciding that waking up was a really bad call. His arms appear to be tied behind a back of a chair. His head is all fuzzy.

“He seems so unexceptional,” someone speaks softly, curiously.

“Doesn’t he just,” a hoarse voice agrees.

Stiles remembers it faintly. The man was there when Stiles got jumped— _shit!_ —in his _house_ , the guy was in Stiles’s **_house_** , god, let his dad be okay. They just sprung on him. Pulled a bag over his head, he fought back, someone hit him in the face—which rather explains the unwillingness of his eye to open. Then they put a cloth to his nose and mouth which knocked him out, and now he’s here. Wherever that is. His head hurts like a bitch, but he doesn’t feel particularly bruised, which is good news he supposes. Could have woken up with purple fingers and cracked ribs.

“I rather thought creatures like him were a fanciful myth the werewolves cooked up to scare their children. An antidote to their entire species.” The stranger makes a pleased sound. “Whatever can we do with him? So many possibilities.”

Stiles imagines with a shiver a hungry gleam of surgical instruments, and how they will slice him, and cut into him, and bleed him dry, but so very very slowly, because he’s rather one of a kind. Wouldn’t want him to go to waste, would they. There is a sour resignation in him, because a part of him has always known this was coming.

“He’s awake,” someone says in a scarily sweet tone of voice. Stiles wonders what gave him away. He opens his eyes, or at least the one that does open.

A man is standing in front of Stiles, assessing him mentally. His neck is sporting an ugly scar which makes it easy to pinpoint him as the owner of the hoarse voice. His face is young, but his hair is graying, and his eyes are as yellow as a Kanima’s.

Slowly, he reaches his hand forward, and Stiles flinches away, as much as being tied to a chair allows it. The man leers at him with amusement and presses the tip of one finger to Stiles’s temple, dragging it down his cheek in one smooth motion. The scratching sensation of his nail makes Stiles shudder violently. The man takes his hand away and looks at his fingers, rubs them together as if they should be coated with some physical trace of whatever it is Stiles does to the supernatural. Not that Stiles has noticed anything changing about the man upon contact.

The man with the scar doesn’t seem to think he was affected either, as he trains his eyes on Stiles inquisitively. “How long does it take for your powers to work?”

Stiles licks his lips. “Who are you? What do you want?” he asks instead. Not that he expects the man to tell him. Then again, it is pretty obvious from his situation that what they want is his abilities. Stiles can hardly expect their reasons to be benevolent.

The man cocks his head to one side, his expression showing amusement that Stiles should talk back. Stiles stares back without blinking, and the man snorts, then pulls up a chair, sitting across from him.

“I’m Zakchaios.”

Stiles’s eyebrows shoot up. “I’m sorry,” he says with sympathy before checking himself. He really ought to curb his humor when talking with a man who has him tied up, and god only knows where the pack is in all of this. “Is that a species or a name?”

The man’s lips curve, unoffended. “Name.”

Stiles shakes his head. “Boy, the Hale family sure seems to stick out like a sore thumb, don’t they? How dare they name their children Derek. Laura. When clearly they all should be like Deucalion, and Zakchaios and, I dunno, Agamemnon.”

“Amusing. Although I hear your own name fits the pattern of announcing how unordinary you are quite nicely,” the man retorts.

Stiles flushes, wondering how he knows. It’s not a national secret, or anything, it’s in his birth certificate, but that does require some snooping around in his records. “My name’s Polish, it’s not in freaking Babylonian or Aramaic or what-have-you. Poland is still a thing, although my name and I sure wish it weren’t.”

“Yes, you have a quaint little moniker, don’t you?” Zakchaios leans closer. “So tell me, **_Stiles_** ,” and Stiles swears he expects a forked tongue to slip out past his lips when he’s hissing the _‘s’_ sound. “How long. Does it take. For your powers to work. Your comrades are all pretty anxious to test it.”

And with that spoken, it becomes clear that these people, whoever they are, do have the pack as well, or at least some of them. Stiles thinks frantically what answer will give him an upper hand. “It takes time,” he lies, heart beating fast. Zakchaios’s eyes narrow, and god but he hopes these folks aren’t like werewolves who can always hear a lie. “I mean, look, it’s like when your phone is dead, and you plug it in, and you try to immediately turn it on, but it just flips you off with an image of a depleted battery. It’s like that!” Stiles is really proud with this suddenly inspired comparison. Comparisons always convince people, it’s a psychology of suggestion. “It’s not magic. Transferring energy takes time. So maybe it takes twenty minutes. Maybe longer. It’s not exact, it’s just—I—” Stiles stops and fails to make a point, because he didn’t really have one. “What do you want?” he asks, feeling a little like drowning. “With me? With the pack?”

“I want to _know_ ,” Zakchaios replies, leaning towards him intimately. Three words and that’s it, that’s his whole answer. Up close Stiles notices that his eyes are utterly insane. “I want to know if you can take their power and keep it. I want to know if their bite will turn you. I want to know if I can open up your skull and let your head breathe, and what your brain will smell like. I want to know if you friends will cry over your body. I want to know how it will taste when I make you hold them down, and they are human in your arms, and I will cut them, and they will bleed, and they can’t heal because of your touch, and I will tie your arms to them, or maybe I won’t, maybe I’ll allow you the choice to let go, but if you do, someone will die, and maybe it will be you, and it’s an easy choice then, isn’t it, and I will drink on their grief over it, but then maybe it will be them, and they will beg you to let go, they will cry and hate, and we will torture them together, you and I, yes, this will be a pain much more potent, wouldn’t you agree?”

Stiles is coated with a sheen of sweat, of cold dread, staring at the man with wide eyes, absolutely terrified. All of his anxieties are clawing at him from the inside, choking him, and Stiles feels a beginning of a panic attack.

Zakchaios leans even closer and sucks in a deep loud breath, and for some reason Stiles gets the distinct impression that the man is inhaling his fear.

“He’s lying about his powers. Let’s see how long it really takes,” he declares abruptly, standing up. “Put him with the crazy one.”

“What?” Stiles feels his stomach drop. “No, I—No!” he protests, as someone’s arms are untying him. He tries to break away. “That doesn’t even make sense! Don’t you want to dissect me, to study me, to make me a living weapon?”

“Why would I want that?” Zakchaios almost laughs, like the idea of Stiles’s usefulness is somehow preposterous. Stiles begins to realize he had the man pegged all wrong. Zakchaios brings his face close to him quite suddenly, his face now devoid of all humor, and something flashes in his hand. “All I want is your pain,” he says in a low voice, and plunges a knife into Stiles’s thigh.

Stiles screams, the pain of a blade in him is alien and familiar at once. His vision blurs, but when he looks up, spouting a litany of curses, he sees the expression on Zakchaios’s face. His eyes are close and fluttering, mouth parted expectantly, and Stiles has one word for that expression: bliss.

Through the pain, he barely manages to struggle against the hands that clamp strongly and painfully around his forearms.

“No,” he mutters, whimpers, digging his heels into the floor. “No, let go of me!” He is resolved to fight, not to succumb into begging. “Let go, let me go, stop, why are you doing this, what did we ever do to you, you bastards!”

“Nothing yet,” Zakchaios replies airily, as Stiles is being dragged further and further away. “It is about what you’re gonna do for us. All of you, supernatural beings, your lives so beautifully broken and twisted with abandonment, loss, death, rage and, oh, so much grief. So potent, all your feelings, compared to the ordinary humans. So saturated, so _alive_.”

Sometimes a vampire is just a vampire. And other times it’s not your blood at all that it finds delicious.

Stiles wonders whose cell they’re bringing him to. He considers Erica and Isaac: they are by far the least stable ones as far as Stiles is concerned, and he means it in the nicest way possible because they are still his good friends. He is almost certain it’s not gonna be Scott, and is glad for it. He has only ever prevented a turning **_before_** it happened—he isn’t sure what he’s gonna do with an actual fanged-out moon-crazy wolf. He fears that the werewolf will manage to sink his teeth into him before Stiles’s miracle power will kick in and work its magic. He fears it will not work at all. Scott would have been devastated to have killed him.

They shove Stiles inside, and the door hits him when he tries to back out. He stumbles and falls, gasping breathlessly, as the fall explodes with fresh pain in his wounded leg. The floor is stone, very gothic-dungeon-like, and so are the walls when he reaches blindly for them, trying to steady himself.

Something uncoils in the far corner, a shape Stiles can hardly see in the blackness that surrounds him, and a werewolf rumbles at him like a thundercloud.

Stiles sees the unmistakable red of his eyes.

 

***

 

Every so often Stiles has nightmares about the nights of the full moon. He dreams of holding Derek’s hand and being separated by some stupid terrifying reason, sometimes by no reason at all aside from the cruelty of a dream. It doesn’t matter _how_ , it just happens. Time and time again, his dream-hand slips out of Derek’s dream-hand, and he can only watch, completely frozen, as he turns into a monster thirsting for blood, and Stiles is left trapped with the werewolf and his own fear and the promise of pain.

 

***

 

The eyes tell Stiles everything he needs to know.

He is allotted no time to think about anything else, because the wolf charges at him with all its large mass. Stiles’s eyes are still growing accustomed to the dark, so he jumps to the side instinctively and blindly, rather than with any precision. He bruises the soft flesh between his arm and ribcage painfully against something metallic and protruding. The wolf collides with the door with a heavy thud and slides down, shaking its entire body, before turning around—a hulking mess of claws, teeth and werewolf venom.

Stiles raises his hands up in a defensive, pacifying gesture—which is totally dumb, because it is full moon so it’s not Derek any longer, it’s just an animal in whose head a torpid mind of Derek Hale only slumbers. The roar of blood in Stiles’s ears is nearly indistinguishable from the low rumble inside the werewolf’s chest.

 _Think of it like rodeo, Stiles,_ he tells himself. _Just jump on him and grab and don’t let go until it’s over. You just need a few seconds, that’s all._

It helps little: with the size of the creature, with the blood-red color of his eyes that makes Stiles a little weak in the knees, with his fangs glistening like knives in his saliva-filled mouth, Stiles is less and less sure that his ability will be able to cancel out the werewolf’s fast enough before Derek has his teeth around his neck.

He has no plan but this one.

He hopes to god his preternatural abilities grant him dexterity to boot tonight, and as the wolf pounces at him again, Stiles lunges to the side as quickly as he can and then executes his half-ass plan: jumps on top of the creature, grabbing both his flanks with his hands, fingers burrowing deep into the fur.

The werewolf growls thunderously, rushing forward, and Stiles’s leg is in pure agony as the wolf drags him across the floor, Stiles only half on top of him. He digs his nails further in. For one dreadful moment nothing is changing, and the werewolf snaps his teeth at him and shakes violently, so that Stiles almost falls down. One of the paws claws him hard, but at least those are not his teeth, _not his teeth thank god_. Stiles latches on even stronger, and pushes himself higher, holding on like a python, as tightly as is humanly possible.

Then it starts.

The wolf stops, its legs shaking, and its fur begins to disappear and shed, and the bones start reforming, and to feel it under his palms is terrifying. It is one of the most disturbing sensations Stiles has ever known. (He does not let go.) The fur vanishes completely, but the body is not yet fully human, and it feels broken, some of the cartilage looking the wrong way or positioned in the wrong place. Stiles feels ribs shifting and repositioning underneath himself, shoulders moving with wet cracks under his fingers. (It must take less than a minute, but it’s the longest minute of Stiles’s life.)

Finally, all that’s left is a human. Stiles exhales shakily, and for a moment they just breathe together, their furious panting filling the room loudly. Stiles tries to lift some of his weight from Derek’s back.

“Don’t!” Derek growls as soon as Stiles moves even slightly. His voice is hoarse and wet. “Don’t you let go,” he warns.

Stiles’s heart is still running a marathon in his chest, his breath coming out in short panicked shudders, and he thinks he will never tear his fingers away from Derek’s ribs, but the comment still manages to annoy him. “What am I a retard?” he snaps back. The idiot wolf should be all gratitude and apologies and concern, but who is he kidding—that’s not Derek Hale’s style.

Derek’s breathing is labored, and Stiles watches his wide back heaving with deep breaths, skin glistening, and his own palms move with his ribcage. Stiles has broken skin there with his nails, and he almost jerks away upon realizing it. And suddenly he feels very stupid and embarrassing, sitting on top of Derek’s naked back like that, fingers pressing into his flanks. Suddenly he wants to be as far away from him as the need to be in constant contact allows.

“I’m gonna move,” he warns, and he wants Derek to object, to order him to stay pinned to him like that, but he doesn’t, of course he doesn’t.

Pressing his palms to Derek’s shoulders, Stiles slowly stands up and moves his legs so that he’s crouching near Derek instead of on top of him. “You can sit up,” he proposes awkwardly.

Derek says nothing and just goes on breathing loudly, but after a while he moves to stand on his hands and knees with a pained grunt, than just on his knees, than sits down—all the way Stiles is holding on to his shoulders. When Derek is seated, Stiles slides his palms down so that his right one is gripping Derek’s left shoulder, and his left one his left wrist—neither of them is comfortable enough for Stiles to unclasp either one of his hands, even though the imminent danger has passed, and Stiles continues holding one with both hands for dear life.

Neither of them pay attention to Derek’s nakedness: in this situation of high adrenaline and higher stakes, their lives hanging in the balance, propriety and personal dignity fly out the window.

Even so, “I should just—Let me—so that you can—” Stiles starts shrugging off his hoodie all the same, and Derek follows his lead, maintaining contact with his skin and helping Stiles get out of the hoodie. When Stiles slips both arms out of his sleeves, Derek drapes it across his thighs in a semblance of decorum.

His eyes are trained on Stiles’s arm, where a gash from a werewolf’s claws—Derek’s claws—is unmistakable. Stiles looks up at Derek nervously, and ‘It’s fine,’ is dancing on the tip of his tongue, a ready response for an apology that is sure to follow. Derek scowls and doesn’t say a thing.

He looks at Stiles’s leg, where blood is soaking into his jeans, and finally at Stiles’s face, and Derek’s own expression is filled with such fury that Stiles feels a nudge of old unease, one that Derek used to instill in him back when they first met but hasn’t in a long time. What does he think, that Stiles asked for this? That there was any choice, and Stiles goaded these crazies into stabbing him? He probably does, at that, given his “high” opinion of Stiles’s mental capacity.

“Are you gonna explain what happened?” Derek asks impatiently, and it’s so ridiculously unfair for him to be angry that Stiles wants to scream and bash Derek’s stupid head against the wall, and he clenches his teeth so tight that they hurt.

“What’s to explain?” he grits. “I got stabbed. And punched in the face—”

“Not that,” Derek interrupts, his face painted with irritation. “The pack. Why are we here?”

Stiles is aware that the way he’s clenching his hands tightly around Derek really gives away every bit of his anger, but he doesn’t even care. “How should I know!” he snaps. “I’m not exactly privy to what’s happening to your pack any longer. Derek.”

“But who’s holding us,” Derek snaps back, impatient. “There’s gotta be _something_ even remotely useful that you can say that will make this—” he stops abruptly.

Stiles thinks his fingernails will pierce Derek’s skin if he squeezes anyharder. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out where Derek was going with this.

“It will make this what?” Stiles demands, and his throat is painfully raw and constricted and he hates it. “Come on, say it, ‘will make this’ what? **_Worth_** it? You think any insight I might have will make getting the crap kicked out of me worth it? Are you for real?”

“That wasn’t what I was gonna say at all,” Derek cuts him off, but his tone is unconvincingly defensive. “Why are you even here?”

Stiles stares at him and thinks that if he doesn’t deck Derek, he might just burst into angry tears. It sounds a lot like Derek thinks that he was just being unbelievably stupid and got himself here by way of some half-ass rescue attempt, or something, which is just so blindingly infuriating, to always be underestimated and misjudged.

“Not by my own volition, if that’s what you’re implying,” he snaps. “What do you think, I got myself here on purpose? I got jumped, like all of you. In my _home_.”

“I mean here, in this cell with me,” Derek grits, his patience rubbed thin. His face is starting to look like its expression might make plants wither. “Don’t they know who you are?”

“Oh, they know,” Stiles mutters. “They don’t care. They are… I think they are some kind of vampires, except they don’t want blood. They want our… _anguish_ , I guess. They want to eat our pain.”

His leg is really killing him and he shifts, trying to ease the pain. “I’m fine by the way, thanks for asking,” he jabs bitterly.

Derek tenses and throws him a look, and Stiles clenches his jaw stubbornly, furious with him for having the gall to look offended at Stiles’s tone of voice.

“I didn’t bite you,” is all he says.

Stiles stares. “Wow. Just, wow. That’s the extent of your concern? As long as you didn’t hurt me, it’s all fine?” He raises his arm with angry blood gashes from Derek’s claws. “Actually, you did hurt me, so I guess it’s only the bite that you’re really worried about, well, thank you so fucking much for this. This is just—great, yeah, fucking **_inspiring_**.”

Derek looks pissed, and just how dare he. Stiles digs his fingers into Derek and then slams their conjoined hands against the floor, wincing, because he wants to hurt, to feel pain—sharp, sudden, not the dull throbbing of blood in his knife wound—and to make Derek feel pain, because it is pretty fucking clear he isn’t capable of feeling anything on the inside.

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” he mutters, hiding his face, and doesn’t expect an answer.

 

***

 

Zakchaois doesn’t give them even ten minutes of respite before the door of the cell opens and he walks in, followed by his minions. Derek glowers at him darkly, unimpressed, because amidst the whole snapping at each other Stiles fails to actually inform him who this guy is. He tenses and curls his hand tightly around Derek’s palm, letting him know that he should be on his guard.

“Well this is rather disappointing,” Zakchaois says, stopping in front of them and bending to bring his face closer to theirs. “I expected more from this encounter.” He takes a deep breath, closing his eyes, like he’s tasting them, and Stiles would have leaned away if he hasn’t been pressed to a wall already. It probably wouldn’t have even mattered, but to see the man savor in their fears feels like an invasion.

Derek is resolutely, grimly silent, but Stiles cannot keep his biting repartees to himself. “And we are clearly devastated by your disappointment,” he grits. “How ever will we go on?”

Zakchaois remains selectively deaf to his glibness, not responding to his taunts in the slightest.

“So much misplaced anger,” he muses aloud, eyes still closed. “So much self-loathing.”

“How about fuck you,” Stiles inserts. Zakchaois opens his eyes abruptly, focusing his yellow stare on him. He straightens up, regarding both of them with contempt.

“It is no matter. I know everything I need to about how to bring out your deepest pain. I have seen into the core of you.” He considers them both, then points at Stiles. “Take him away,” he orders. “Kill him.”

Stiles blinks and isn’t sure he feels anything at the order given, isn’t sure he’s processing the words.

“No!” Derek snarls, crushing Stiles’s wrist so hard in his hand that he might just break it.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Zakchaios snorts, entertained. “Yes, clearly, your refusal will convince me to spare him.” He nods to his people, and several men come in to wrench Stiles away. Panicked, he grabs Derek’s arm with both hands, refusing to let go.

But they are only two. One of the stronger ones holds Derek in a headlock, restraining his ability to fight back, and Stiles is just yanked off his arm. He keeps holding on for as long as he can, but then it’s just like his nightmares: an unyielding force pulling them apart until Stiles feels the tips of their fingers slipping apart.

Stiles twists his head to catch a glimpse of Derek’s face. He’s looking back, and he is helpless and terrified, and Stiles feels a lurch inside his stomach, and Derek’s expression loses all traces of conscious thought altogether. He can only hope that as a wolf Derek might break away, but he’s hardly counting on it: they have managed to capture the pack once already. What’s one wolf?

Stiles doesn’t even fight them as he is being led away. Everything about this is too surreal, because that’s just—that is **_not_** his life. Whatever else is there, whatever craziness has invaded his existence, he cannot just… **_die_**. Every emotion in him shuts down instead in utter impenetrable disbelief.

He closes his eyes and remembers being twelve, and his Mom is dying in the hospital, and when the doctors call it, he just stares, because no, here she is, lying on the bed, she’ll take another breath in a second, she’ll open her eyes, they are wrong, and _this is not his life_ , his mother doesn’t die and leave him and his dad, that stuff happens in books and movies and to someone else but not to him.

Not him.

Hands strap him to a table, and Stiles lies, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, and waits for a Hail Mary, because it can’t just end like this.

His eyes catch on the gleam of the surgical instruments on another table, just like he has feared before. “I thought you weren’t interested in dissecting me,” he says. “I thought you are supposed to kill me.” The words fall from his mouth and still do not mean anything to him.

“We aren’t,” one of the men agrees. “But no one said we had to be quick about it.”

“See, emotions are complex,” someone says, a woman, who sits down by the table near his head, looking at him, like they’re equals, having a conversation. She touches his hair gently, and Stiles stiffens in revulsion. “The pain we collect from the soul is dazzling. So many hues, so many thoughts and contradicting feelings tying into a pattern that’s unique. Physical pain is just that—physical. One flat tone instead of a palette. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy something simple.” She strokes his thigh suggestively, then pushes her finger into his knife wound.

Stiles screams until his lungs are one fire.

He isn’t sure he’s completely there for everything. He is quite suddenly aware of the tip of a blade that trails down the length of his arm, over the marks left by wolf claws. Stiles breathes, throat constricted, and he thinks he should be afraid: maybe that’ll buy him some time, if it’s his fear they are after. He cannot bring himself to care.

He feels a blade lick his shoulder—so sharp Stiles doesn’t realize it at first, and then his skin parts like gauze, like it’s being peeled open, and he screamsgroans, and his throat is too raw to protest.

“Much better,” someone says.

Stiles grits his teeth and slams the back of his skull against the table to offset the pain in his arm and leg. He can feel blood trickling down his shoulder.

A great thud from the door seems to make the entire room shake, and stops a knife from making another cut. Stiles opens his eyes and snaps his head towards the sound. The door trembles again. And again. And _thank god it’s not metal_ Stiles thinks as the wood begins to splinter, cracking more and more with further blows, and finally a massive black shadow crashes through. His fur is splattered with red around his muzzle. His eyes when Stiles catches their gaze hold no human recognition.

Behind him is the rest of the pack, and Stiles isn’t sure if he should be relieved or terrified, except he’s too numb to be the latter, so he sags against the table and breathes. Someone screams. Many someones. There’s panic, there’s fighting. A wet noise of blood. Stiles doesn’t even look, he stares in front of himself and counts his breaths. Through a glass overlooking the room one floor up he catches sight of Zakchaios. He watches his own people being slaughtered—whoever they are to him: underlings, sycophants, friends. He watches their fear and pain and the wolves tearing everything apart and he is _smiling_.

In this moment Stiles wonders which one of them is the true soulless. Him and the myths surrounding him, or Zakchaois who cares about nothing at all. The thought makes Stiles break out of his apathy. He might feel too tired to cope with this, but he isn’t too damned tired to care if he _lives or dies_ , thank you very much.

He snaps his head to one side, then the other, and his eyes locate the woman who spoke to him before, the one who stroked his hair. She is cowering behind the table that Stiles is strapped to, holding the same knife she was prepared to plunge into him not several moments before. “Untie me,” Stiles whispers hoarsely. She turns to stare at him. “Cut me loose,” he tells her. “I can stop them.”

She just looks at him, and for a moment Stiles thinks she is too scared to comprehend his words. Then she raises her blade and cuts the leather bindings on one of his arms. With a grunt Stiles rolls to the opposite side, freeing his other hand. His fingers feel thick and useless and too slow. He sits up, unfastening his legs next, and rolls down from the table onto the floor.

He lands on his bad leg and groans through the white hot pain that brings tears to his eyes. He feels like he wants to puke, and then just curl up here and not be, because this is just too much, all of it. Too much pain to feel, and he finally gets why they say that people faint from torture, because he is too exhausted to even feel.

He looks up, and his mind is blocking out all the fighting that is happening. He cannot even recognize if any one of his friends is badly hurt. His whole remaining attention is riveted to Derek.

This time Stiles isn’t even afraid. He’s way past feeling anything. The wolf draws near, and Stiles waits for him, too tired to move. His left leg doesn’t feel like it would accommodate any movement anyway. When the wolf is only a few feet away, Stiles pushes himself forward from where he’s kneeling and crashes into him, just _falls_ , making the wolf recoil with a growl, and wraps himself around his enormous neck, until it’s only Derek who is in his embrace. Stiles clutches at him tightly, shuddering, and thinks he will never be brave enough to let go.

Derek is breathing heavily, coughing and spitting, and twists his head away immediately, already trying to put some distance between them, but Stiles only clings tighter, pressing their chests together, and he shakes for some reason until he realizes that he’s crying. He can’t even feel it, but his shoulders are shuddering with pitiful sobs that he can’t stop. Derek freezes, noticing it, and Stiles feels his careful hands press to his ribs and stroke his back.

“Stiles,” he whispers softly, and Stiles is dizzy and is abruptly spiraling into blackness. The pack is circling around them anxiously, but Derek still smells as their Alpha, whatever the form he’s in, and his eyes still flash red at them, and they wag their tales submissively and do not approach.

“I think I’m gonna pass out,” Stiles mumbles. He imagines in his delirious state someone whispering _‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’_ to him, but there is no way it is something other than a dream.

 

***

 

Sitting on the terrace of Scott’s house, straddling a chair, Stiles has his right arm extended in front of him, simultaneously blocking the sun and studying the claw marks detachedly. His left arm is draping the chair, and he’s resting his chin on top of it tiredly. The four claw-marks are still a fresh angry-red on his forearm. Except for the fact that it’s a hot Indian summer, and he has to wear long sleeves so that his father won’t see, Stiles isn’t sure what he feels about them.

“I wish I could take away your pain,” Scott says quietly from the doorway. Stiles startles and looks behind guiltily, like he’s been caught doing something incriminating. Scott steps out on the terrace and offers him a bottle of _Coke_.

“How’s Derek?” Scott asks, slouching back in his chair.

Stiles peers at him suspiciously. “ _How’s Derek,_ ” he echoes slowly. “You’re asking **_me_** how’s Derek? You’re the one who _talks_ to him every day!”

“And every day I ask him how is Stiles, even though I talk to _you_ every day,” Scott replies, taking a sip from the bottle.

Stiles stares blankly. “ _What_.”

“I mean, how are things between you two,” Scott repeats patiently and particularly _slowly_ , like he’s explaining something to a child. “Stop taking me for a fool.”

Stiles, honest to god, hasn’t got a clue what Scott is playing at. Things are rubbish, which they always have been, and why should he be asking anything about _anything_ concerning the two of them, why the two of them are even discussible together?

“I—don’t—what?”

Scott stares at him for a long moment, like he expects his poker face to drop, or something, except, Stiles still maintains: _no clue._ Scott tosses his head back with a groan. “I can’t believe it. You two are morons.”

“I’m sorry, did you just call me a moron? Us? Me?” Stiles punches Scott in the shoulder. “You cannot even think on your own without someone else’s help. Your deductive reasoning is, like, _appalling_. If it weren’t for me, you’d be a Big Bad Hide on somebody’s wall.”

“So, I’m logically challenged,” Scott shrugs. “Not a moron, though. Unlike you two. You are just—pfft—” he snorts, shaking his head, “—laughably, pathetically deficient.”

“Hey, hey! Easy on the praise there,” Stiles scowls. Then he realizes he’s scowling, which reminds him of Derek, and he scowls some more, angry with himself. “What are you even _talking_ about, me and Derek. Since when there’s a ‘me and Derek’ in that thick head of yours?”

Scott stares at him incredulously. “My god, Stiles. The guy was dying, and I left you to nurse him back to health. Are you _incapable_ of talking to each other, or something? I mean, yeah, him, I get. He’s Derek, he’s verbally constipated, he doesn’t share things. But you, Stiles, come on! I figured you wouldn’t have that problem. You were literally through certain death just now, what more could you possibly be waiting for?”

Stiles blinks, digesting Scott’s outburst. He’s prone to those when he gets worked up. That he’s getting worked up about Stiles’s non-existent relationship with Derek, however, is a novelty—which, by the way, yeah, alright, he might actually want, slightly, or even rather badly.

“He’s blaming me for what happened with that Zakchaios character,” he says eventually, looking at his knees and thinking back to Derek’s barely contained fury in that cell.

That takes Scott of guard. “You’re kidding,” he says flatly, squinting, and his face adopts a dark ‘let-me-at-him’ expression.

“He was **_sooo_** pissed at me. He” —Stiles lifts his sleeve up again— “got me _this_. And he’s pissed at **_me_**.”

“Hm,” Scott say, and his face is inscrutable. “That fucker.”

Stiles can appreciate his succinct way of putting it. A subtle hint of mockery in Scott’s voice doesn’t elude him, but he isn’t sure what Scott is trying to needle him about.

“How is Isaac?” he asks sweetly, turning the tables on Scott. Let him be uncomfortable for a change.

Scott attempts to grimace but ends up looking sheepish instead. “Haha. Hilarious. He’s _homeless_ , Stiles, what do you expect me to do? Derek just flew off the handle at us—”

“—because he was mad at me because he’s a fucker—” Stiles works in. Scott rolls his eyes because he’s a drama queen.

“— _so_ **_Isaac_** ,” he continues, stressing his words, “considers himself kicked out.”

“And you offered him to move in,” Stiles makes a cutsie face at him. “Aw. Might we expect a happy announcement soon, you adorable lovebirds, you.”

“He says I snore,” Scott complains as a way of answering.

Stiles snorts. “The gall of him.”

“Yeah. And he hasn’t seen _Star Wars,_ so that’s a total deal-breaker. I’m not shopping for a ring just yet.”

“Smart man,” Stiles grins and takes a sip from the bottle, then shoots Scott a sly glance. “And you do snore.”

Scott looks at him with fake annoyance. “Stiles. You drool, and you have sleep patterns of a crack-addict.”

“Sleep’s for children.” He considers briefly, and starts bending fingers. “And dead people. And mentally healthy people. And people who work and just have to.”

“So, for everyone but you.”

Stiles shrugs. “Sleep’s boring.”

They sit in silence for a while, watching the sunset, and it’s a little like Stiles’s nights with Derek, except better, because Scott is familiar, and not a tangle of emotional fuck-ups, and he’s _unstressful._

“Tell me a story?” Scott asks suddenly, his voice mellow.

Stiles turns to look at him, surprised. Scott’s face is open and unashamed and sporting a loopy smile. Stiles smiles back at him, a little silly, wishing viciously that whatever else happens, this between them will never change.

“Aren’t you a little too old for that?” he teases.

“No one’s ever too old for that.”

Stiles snorts. “Ugh. I instantly got this horrifying mental picture right now, of you in your dotage, and we’re just basically old farts, and you pester me to tell you stories.”

“You’ll be **_reading_** them to me by then,” Scott amends, unconcerned with the prospect. “Because you’ll be senile and won’t remember them anymore. And you’ll constantly wear one pair of glasses on your nose, and one on your head, forgetting that you put ‘em there.”

“Oh no, please, please, stop.” He laughs. “Let’s just not grow old. Ever.”

Scott’s grinning widely. “There’s an idea. Now, a story.”

“Oh my god you are insufferable.”

“It’s either that or I talk about Derek,” Scott shrugs. “How are you guys doing not talking again?”

“Okay, blackmail successful,” Stiles throws his hands up in defeat. “A story it is.”

He wonders what the occasion calls for. Something about stupid, loyal friendships, he thinks.

 

***

 

Stiles tolerates Derek’s proud silence for a little under a week. It takes him two days to grow from hurt and confused to majorly depressed, then two days to go from that to utterly outraged, and finally two more days to find himself on the porch of Derek’s house.

Derek opens the door before Stiles has the chance to viciously hammer on it, robbing him of the satisfaction and the angry build-up of the act. Stiles stares at him, somehow surprised to find Derek cleaned up and clad in his usual choice of clothes of a mortuary worker, face and arms clean and absent of any wounds. It feels a little like nothing has even happened, like there was no naked, bloodied, beaten Derek in the dungeons with him.

“What?” Derek asks in his Number One Most Unpleasant Dickish Voice. Stiles continues to stare, and there’s apparently no need to hammer on anyone’s door to be geared up for anger when Derek achieves the same results with one fucking word.

“Well, hello to you to.”

Derek crosses his arms, determined not to be baited, and looms in his own doorway. “What do you want, Stiles?” he demands, and the ‘let’s-pretend-nothing-happened’ apparently extends not to just how Derek looks but also to how he’s planning on behaving.

“Can I come in?” He steps closer, and Derek doesn’t move an inch, boring into Stiles with his intense angry eyes. No invitation is extended. Stiles sputters, momentarily at a loss for words. “Really? Is that how it’s gonna be, huh?”

“What do you want?” Derek repeats, undeterred.

“What do I want? To talk? Preferably not on your porch? A shred of concern from you might be nice, or, I dunno, how about not being an asshole for a few seconds? _Hey, Stiles, how you’ve been since we last got locked up by murderous psychos?_ Why are you even so goddamned angry with me about it?”

The question seems to genuinely startle Derek. “I’m not angry with you,” he says, frowning.

Stiles scoffs. “Oh? Could have fooled me.” He pauses, the momentum of his outburst depleted. “You’re gonna let me in or what?” He looks up. Derek doesn’t move and stares back silently, which leaves Stiles newly exasperated. “Well? And? So? You’re gonna contribute anything to this conversation? Like, maybe, _I’m sorry I was such a dick, here’s why, but it won’t happen again,_ and then I’ll be like, _It’s cool bro, let’s forget it_ —”

“You want an apology?” Derek interrupts, sounding both angry and incredulous.

“Oh, don’t you ask me that like you did nothing wrong!” Stiles bristles.

“Wrong?” Derek echoes, his tone extremely bitter. “Did I do anything _right_?”

“What?”

Derek finally leaves the doorway, stepping out onto the porch and slamming the door behind himself. “What good is me apologizing if nothing’s gonna change?” he snaps, and Stiles falls into stunned silence, not expecting this sudden lash-out. “It’s **_never_** gonna be an _‘I’m sorry, this won’t happen again,’_ because it **_will_** happen. I can’t prevent that. I can’t—” Derek pushes out a sharp breath, his anger choking him a little, “— can’t change who I am and the life I’m living, and what it’s doing to _your_ life.”

“Did I **_ask_** you to?” Stiles says slowly, more annoyed by this self-flagellating confession than anything. “All I’m saying is, we’ve been through some tough spots, and I kinda thought we were getting _pretty_ _amazing_ at it, and now you’re being a bag of dicks, and I deserve to know why.”

Derek gives him a look that’s a little despairing, like there is no way he can answer this question, like maybe there’s no right answer, and Stiles is really uncomfortable with how raw this conversation has become, and to see that Derek is equally uncomfortable is probably the only thing keeping him from bailing.

“I can’t apologize to you,” Derek says, “because you will get hurt again, and it will be my fault. I cannot promise it won’t happen again because it will. I cannot protect you because it’s me who’s dangerous. I cannot say anything that will reassure you, or please you, or make you less afraid.”

“ _Afraid?_ ” Stiles repeats, boggled. “Where is _this_ coming from?”

“You got hurt. It was **_my_** fault,” Derek says, and Stiles feels the words throbbing in the scars on his arm.

“And so what, now you’re punishing me? Brilliant logic, that, Sherlock!”

“That look,” Derek’s voice is very soft and almost reluctant, “I can never take it away.”

“What look?! What are you even talking about?” Stiles, having lost Derek’s train of thought entirely, explodes from how frustratingly unforthcoming Derek is.

“This spring,” Derek says, and Stiles bulges his eyes at him, because _what?!_ and spring is way back when, and Derek has apparently decided things started going rough then, and also _what?!_ “When Gerard sent those hunters after you. I came back after dealing with them, and you saw that I was all covered in their blood. My **_face_** was in their blood. _That_ look,” he elaborates.

Stiles stares at him open-mouthed and feels his face flushing with being righteously, royally **_pissed off_**. For a moment he cannot bring himself to do anything, then buries his face in his hands with a long groan.

“Oh. My. _God._ Derek Hale.” Stiles runs his fingers through his hair. “If you’re gonna stand there and tell me you’re holding against me the way I looked when I was freaking **_dying_** from a **_stab_** wound, I’m gonna—” he pauses, gasping for the right words frantically, “— ** _punch you in the neck!_** ” And those are not nearly enough words to convey the utter helpless rage he feels. He curls his hands into fists. “You, my friend, are _crap_ at reading facial expressions! You think I was afraid of you, I was freaking _elated_ that my ass got saved!”

“I put your ass in danger,” Derek contradicts, which is just astoundingly selfish. Stiles groans, and thinks that if he had longer hair, he’d be pulling at them in irritation.

“Derek. Allow me to let you in on a little secret,” he says in an indulgent _I-am-speaking-to-you-like-you’re-a-child-stop-behaving-like-one_ tone. “There’s this supernatural craigslist, clearly. And somebody, maybe it was Gerard, or some other hunter, or those pesky annoying witches last year, I don’t know, but somebody went on there, and posted for the world to see: _Heads up, ppl, there’s this soulless teenager living in a little backwater town called Beacon Hills. 5’10’’, has a tongue that just won’t quit. Goes by Stiles._ Because, I don’t know if you have _noticed_ , what with you being busy blaming **_everything_** on yourself, but sometimes supernatural beings come, and that’s not all about you. Like this time. They _knew_. And your efforts to protect me from yourself are valiant, but you won’t be able to protect me from _myself_. And what I am? I was born into it. I’m pretty much contracted out to the supernatural. And I’m meddlesome, and I have a knack for getting myself into trouble, and that’s just who I am, who I would have always been, and that is **_not_** on you.”

Derek grabs his arm and yanks the sleeve up. “ _That_ is on me,” he says, staring pointedly at the claw-marks on Stiles’s arm.

“I never blamed you for this,” Stiles retorts sharply, taking his arm back.

The look on Derek’s face says that he thinks Stiles should have and is therefore a moron. He doesn’t say it, but Stiles sees the answer clear as day in his eyes: _But I did._

“I can’t change who I am,” Derek tells him stubbornly, and Stiles is shaking his head, because why is he so hung up on it, like Stiles would want him any other way, even his seven layers of asshole.

“ ** _I_** can!” He grabs Derek’s wrist, making a point, but Derek shakes his fingers off.

“And the next moon it’s gonna be the same shit all over again!” he says, scowling.

“So?” Stiles demands defiantly.

“So, you can’t hold my hand through this for the rest of your life!” Derek growls.

“Of course I can!”

And then— _oh_. He didn’t really think before answering, barely even listened, and as the words click into place in his head he belatedly understands he didn’t _really_ mean to say it, wasn’t expecting _that_ to be the argument—and yet he _does_ mean it, too, has meant it for a long time now.

Derek stares at him, his face startled, bared, caught off-guard, and sees Stiles’s face elongate into astonishment as his own head catches up with his mouth. It makes Derek lower his head with a rueful exhausted chuckle.

“Stiles…” he begins to say, but Stiles cuts him off.

Because here’s the thing: people are flawed. And sometimes they cannot change their flaws on their own—only with the help of other people. Sometimes it’s alcohol, or anger issues, or health problems. And sometimes a person is a werewolf. And then there’s that other person who helps them get over it. Stiles’s case may be extremely literal, but point is, there’s a bigger scale, and maybe he and Derek are not as messed up as one might think. And anyway, what really matters is this: if loving someone, honestly, deeply, is being able to walk through life hand in hand with them, then Stiles should have pulled his head out of his ass a long time ago and taken a hint, because that’s him and Derek and their epic love story.

“I can,” he repeats and looks at Derek, questioning and hopeful. “I could,” he amends pleadingly.

Derek searches his eyes, brows knit together darkly, and Stiles reads in his face a doubt that is almost bottomless. That he doesn’t give Stiles enough credit to know what he’s talking about. And maybe on many other occasions he shouldn’t, because Stiles is notoriously bad at decision-making. But he should definitely trust Stiles on this.

“Could you, though?” Derek asks very quietly, because he doesn’t think Stiles knows what he’s saying, and they’re about to act on this, and if Stiles is wrong, it’ll be a disaster.

“I want to,” Stiles promises and steps right into his personal space, so their chests are almost touching. Derek is very quiet for a moment, and Stiles holds his breath and waits. His heart is beating heavily, painfully, and what Stiles is actually waiting for is for Derek to step the hell away, because there’s this other thing they haven’t talked about tonight—the thing where if Derek kisses him, he loses a part of himself, and if he cannot commit to this, there is absolutely nothing Stiles can do to change his mind.

The thought makes him inhale through his nose sharply, desperately, because he’s been hunting these past months for things to be back to normal, to how they were, with long nights spent in each other’s company, neither fully relaxed, nor stressed, and this humongous issue hanging over their heads, forever unresolved, because no one wants to put himself out there. Except no, he knows now, that he wants more than that, and he is desperately afraid to have it, but that’s how it is.

Derek bends his head towards him, slowly, and their lips are about to touch, and Stiles shuts his eyes, overcome with the hot tingling sensation of fear and impatience.

“Stiles…” Derek whispers his name, this time not as a rebuke but something else entirely, and Stiles opens his eyes again, startled and shivering.

Derek doesn’t kiss him. Instead, with extreme tenderness that Stiles hasn’t thought him capable of, Derek takes his hand. Stiles watches, open-mouthed and breathless, as Derek slowly brings his hand up and presses it to his face. (Stiles gives a little involuntary startle as the bubble of anticipation finally pops and floods his body.) Derek nuzzles into his knuckles and inhales his scent, then draws his dry closed lips against his skin and finally opens his mouth and kisses his fingers, and Stiles is shaking from the wetness of it.

It is a gesture more important than anything else Derek could have done. Because Stiles has conquered him, made him into what Derek so feared in his tales of curse-breakers—here he is, giving away the proverbial leash and willingly, too. Happy to be defeated. Because it’s not just the kisses, doesn’t have to be kisses at all. Because Derek is ready for this too—to give up his control every time they are touching, to give all of himself up to this and to accept everything Stiles has to offer too.

The feeling is almost too much to bear, and Stiles shivers, and he wants to soar, or burst into sunlight, but he’s confined to being this body, and these arms, and this face. He takes his hand back, almost too abruptly, and Derek meets his eyes in alarm, and Stiles grabs both sides of his face and pulls him into a kiss, opening his mouth wide like he wants to breathe the whole of him in. Derek’s hands land on his ribs, twisting into his t-shirt, and he isn’t nearly as impetuous in his response. His mouth presses to Stiles’s mouth dryly, gently, until Stiles cools down from demanding into patient, and Derek doesn’t rush them, his kisses long and unhurried and thorough. But it’s his hands that tell another story, the way his thumbs are rubbing into Stiles’s ribs, fingers travelling up and down his sides, like what Derek really wants to do is crush him, dive into him, both hands and mouth, and he’s restraining himself the best he knows how, and still his kisses are getting deeper, dominating, like he wants to lick each of the kisses dry. Stiles wants to tell him it’s okay, he won’t break, but there has been enough soul-searching for one day. They’ll build new borders of this scary and wonderful thing between them as they go.

When their mouths part, Stiles feels like hanging onto Derek’s arms for a little while, melting into his embrace bonelessly, and resting their foreheads together. “How about you let me in now,” he murmurs into Derek’s shoulder, a little breathless.

Derek laughs, and Stiles squeezes his eyes shut, feeling it reverberating through him pleasantly. “Yeah. That’s probably a good idea,” he sighs, but for a while they do not move.

 

***

 

“Does your Druid tell you _everything_ about yourself?” Zakchaois asks, slithering on the floor. Stiles finds it apt, because isn’t he the proverbial fucking Serpent right now. “Does he even know?”

It takes them two weeks to track him down, and Derek’s being over-bearing about Stiles being traumatized and _you shouldn’t be there when we confront him_ but Stiles just shrugs, because traumatized? Really? Well, clearly, he’s too brain-damaged already to be sufficiently traumatized by such experiences. Derek scowls, and hovers, and Stiles smiles to himself and thinks that maybe that’s what it is: that Derek finally allows himself to hover and to passive-aggressively admit that yeah, newsflash, he **_cares_** , and they are both cautiously glad for it, so Stiles doesn’t have much time to linger on petty details like being kidnapped and nearly avoiding a very violent death.

“You keep wondering if you’re truly _soul_ -less,” Zakchaois stares at him unblinkingly, and Stiles is still waiting for that forked tongue to make an appearance. “If you’re empty and godless. I have seen into your fear, and I can tell you **_all_** about that. I can see into the **_heart_** of you!”

Stiles hears Derek let out a soundless sigh of distress behind his back and turns to look at him, a mixture of warm reassurance and fierce loyalty on his face, and he takes Derek by the hand with much deliberation. “I know **_exactly_** how much soul I have, thank you very much,” he says. “I don’t need you for that.”

Whatever it is in the metaphysics of the world that makes some people change easily (like Scott), and some through painful metamorphosis (like Jackson), and some not at all (like Lydia); that makes some people not survive it, and others, like himself, be able to turn the change back—it may depend on something within them all, maybe even on the very same element, but it is not a soul.

Stiles knows now that he cannot be without a soul—because he’s somebody’s soul _-mate_. He holds Derek’s hand in his, and with that he knows where he belongs in the world.


End file.
